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HORACE MANN 




HORACE MANN 



PIONEERS IN EDUCATION 



HORACE MANN 

AND THE PUBLIC SCHOOL IN THE 
UNITED STATES 



BY 



GABRIEL COMPAYRE 

CORRESPONDENT OP THE INSTITUTE ; DIRECTOR OP THE ACADEMY 

OF LYONS; AUTHOR OP "PSYCHOLOGY APPLIED TO 

EDUCATION," "LECTURES ON PEDAGOGY," 

" A HISTORY OP PEDAGOGY," ETC. 



TRANSLATED BY 
MARY D. FROST 



NEW YORK 

THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 

PUBLISHERS 



!"Lia«*HY of CONGRESS 
j i wo Co ole? Received 

0C1 1 190f 

xxc! no; 

CO FY B. ' 



TLASfcA- 



COPYRIGHT, 1907, 

By THOMAS Y. CROWELL & COMPANY. 



Published, September, 1907. 



CONTENTS AND SUMMAET 

Preface 

Preamble 

I. The life of Horace Mann previous to 1837. — His 

origin. — Poor and laborious childhood. — Preco- 
cious taste for reading. — The little library founded 
by Franklin. — The village school. — Mann revolts 
from the gloomy teachings of Calvinism. — Keen 
sentiment for the beauties of nature. — Family 
affections. — His tenderness for his mother. — 
His devotion to his sister. — His first marriage. — 
Despair caused by the loss of his wife. — His friend- 
ships. — Mann as a lawyer. — Mann as member of 
Congress, senator, politician. — His work for the 
amelioration of the treatment of the blind. — His 
campaign against intemperance. — Brilliancy of his 
public position and sadness of his private life . 

II. Horace Mann, secretary of the Board of Education of 

Boston (1837-1848). — Formation of the Board of 
Education. — Why Mann was chosen secretary of 
the Board. — His devotion to humanity and his 
love of children. — His faith in education. — 
Limited powers of the Board and of its secretary. — 
No effective authority. — No means of action ex- 
cept appeal to public opinion. — From the first day 
Mann sets to work. — Conventions. — First lecture 
tour. — Crusade against ignorance. — Not always 
an audience at his lectures. — The common school 
journal. — Mann acts by speech and pen. — The 



iv CONTENTS AND SUMMARY 

twelve annual reports. — Character of these reports, 
genuine scholastic manifestoes. — Their historical 
interest. — Their pedagogic value. — Tables show- 
ing the condition of Massachusett schools in 1837. — 
Analyses of the twelve reports. — How Mann pre- 
pared them. — Questions addressed to competent 
persons. — The seventh report. — Account of Euro- 
pean trip. — Favorable impression made upon Mann 
by German schools. — Somewhat excessive eulogy 
of German teachers. — Severe judgment on France. 
— Violent opposition encountered by Mann in his 
own country. — The non-sectarian school attacked 
by the American sectaries, as the French lay school 
was to be later. — Conflict with the Boston school- 
masters. — Reform of Boston schools. — Founda- 
tion of normal schools. — Necessity for professional 
training of teachers. — Pierce, master of the Lexing- 
ton Normal School. — School libraries. — Impor- 
tance of good books. — Other pedagogical innova- 
tions by Mann. — Lectures to teachers. — Graduated 
tables of the districts. — Mann's disinterestedness, 
his pecuniary sacrifices. — Results of his twelve 
years of labor. — He is elected representative from 
Massachusetts to the Congress at Washington. — 

Resigns his secretaryship 23 

III. Mann's philosophy and general ideas. — No per- 
sonal philosophy. — Philosophical system borrowed 
from George Combe. — The author of The Constitu- 
tion of Man. — What attracted Mann in Combe's 
theories. — The reasons for his being a phrenologist. 
— The laws of the development of the mind, symme- 
try, and activity. — Mann's spirituality. — A strain of 
mysticism. — A Puritan without theology. — Faith 
in the immortality of the soul. — Moral psychology 
of Mann. — The higher faculties, conscience and the 



CONTENTS AND SUMMARY v 

feeling of responsibility. — Intellect subordinated 
to feeling. — Great ideas come from the heart. — 
Intellectual culture subordinated to moral culture. — 
Utilitarian tendencies. — Universal education a ^ 
social debt. — Mann's hesitation in regard to ob- 
ligatory school attendance. — His eloquence. — 
Qualities and defects of his style. — His political 
views. — The honest man and good citizen. — The 
perils of unenlightened universal suffrage. — Without 
education no safety 72 

IV. Horace Mann, president of Antioch College (1853- 

1859). — Mann elected governor of Massachusetts. 

— He prefers to assume the direction of Antioch 
College in Ohio. — His enthusiasm for this new work. 

— Dreams and reality. — Material difficulties. — 
Miserable accommodations. — Financial embarrass- 
ment. — Hostility of those about him. — His cour- 
age triumphs over all obstacles. — Organization of 
studies. — Selection of students. — Moral qualities 
preferred to intellectual gifts. — Innovations in pro- 
gramme and methods of instruction. — Principles 
of discipline. — Punishments to be avoided. — 
Pupils governed by appealing to their conscience. — 
Liberal regime. — Mann's moral authority. — What 
he had retained of the Puritanism of his ancestors. — 
His campaign against tobacco and alcoholic liquors. 

— Experiment in coeducation. — Failing health. — 
Financial ruin of the college. — Mann's final efforts. 

— His death 95 

V. Mann's influence and the Spread of his Work. — What 

would distress Mann, were he to return to this world, 
in the present conditions.— What would rejoice him, 
on the other hand. — Progress of education in the 
United States. — It has not ceased to conform to**' 
Mann's ideas. — The Boston Board of Education 



vi CONTENTS AND SUMMARY 

led to the creation of a central organ of school ad- 
ministration in all the States. — That progress has 
advanced slowly. — Present statistics of schools in 
the United States. — Increase of high schools. — 
Influence of Mann over his contemporaries. — His 
greatest disciple, Henry Barnard. — That France 
has been inspired by the ideas and example of Mann. 
— Horace Mann and Felix Pecaut . . . 123 

BlBLIOGKAPHY 133 



PREFACE 

" Without any question/ ' Americans say, "the 
noblest figure in the history of education in our 
country is that of Horace Mann." He owes this 
preeminence, not only to the brilliancy of his 
talents and the authority of his genius, but to the 
circumstances, the surroundings, in which his talents 
and genius were called upon to play their part. 
He may be said to have been "the right man in 
the right place," and we must add, also, "at the 
right time." 

The admiration so justly awarded to Mann by 
his countrymen has not been denied him abroad. 
Felix Pecaut, to speak of no one else, has said of 
him: "I wish that Mann's biography might be 
placed in the hands, not only of all professors, but 
of all their pupils." 

It is this biography which we offer here, in its 
essential features: the biography of a man admi- 
rable in many ways, for candor and purity of soul, 
for nobility of character, for his devotion to the 
cause of education and progress, for his kindness 

3 



4 PREFACE 

of heart no less than for the wealth of a marvel- 
lous intelligence, and, above all, for the extent of 
his activities and the greatness of his scholastic 
work. 

It is especially as a man of action that Mann 
was incomparable. Undoubtedly, it was his good 
fortune to appear at the right moment, just as 
a widespread movement was abroad, impelling 
all good citizens to forward the cause of popular 
education. But to him belongs the credit of 
accelerating this movement and of leading it with 
the ardor and enthusiasm of an apostle — one not 
merely devoted to his work, but passionately ab- 
sorbed in it. He was the eloquent orator of the 
cause of popular education, its preacher and trib- 
une, more concerned, moreover, with the moral con- 
duct of men than with pure science or theoretic 
speculation. 

"Call the astronomer from the heights of heaven," 
he cried to his countrymen; " bring the geologist 
from the depths of the earth; silence all political 
and religious controversies ; assemble all the wisdom, 
talent, and authority that you possess, and then 
begin to teach the people. 7 ' 

But he did not confine himself to arousing and 
enlightening public opinion by his ardent preach- 
ing, to conquering and inspiring it by his faith 



PREFACE 5 

in progress and humanity; he was also a skilful 
organizer, a practical innovator, an indefatigable 
laborer for the reform of education in his country; 
and if he did not aspire to build up a theory, a 
philosophy of education, he did better still, — he 
created a school system. In that respect he was 
a great pedagogical founder, i Mann died fifty 
years ago, but his spirit is still alive and present 
in the public schools of the United States. And 
not in America only, but in Europe, and especially 
in France, scholastic institutions have been in- 
spired by his thought \ The recent history of the 
establishment of French lay schools recalls in more 
than one respect the organization of the American 
common school as Mann undertook and carried 
it into execution a half century ago. And this 
resemblance, this community of views upon educa- 
tion between the two republics, the younger of 
which has followed, somewhat tardily, perhaps, 
but with equal ardor, in the steps of her great 
sister, are sufficient to revive our interest in a study 
of the great American educator. 

Mann did not work for his own country alone, 
he labored for humanity, and, above all, for repub- 
lican humanity. He was working for republican 
principles when he wrote his great address on 
"The Necessity for Education in a Republic, " 



6 PREFACE 

when he said, "In a republic, ignorance is a crime." 
He wrought for humanity, — he who, a few days 
before his death, addressed to his beloved pupils 
these last words, " Be ashamed to die before you 
have won some victory for humanity. " 



HORACE MANN 

The true life of Horace Mann, the life of an 
apostle of popular education, began in 1837, when 
he was already forty years of age. Appointed 
at that date secretary of the Boston Board of 
Education, to reorganize the school system of 
the State of Massachusetts, he entered upon his 
new functions with extraordinary ardor and in- 
tense energy. "life," he said, "assumes a value 
in my eyes which I never before suspected." Up 
to this time he had been a gifted lawyer and a man 
of influence in politics, he was now to become 
an educator. After pleading before the bar of 
his country in hundreds of private causes, nearly 
all of which he won, he was about to take in hand 
the great cause of humanity at large, — of universal 
education. The public school became his idol; 
"the greatest discovery," he called it, "ever made 
by man." During the twelve years that he held 
this position, he multiplied speeches and pam- 
phlets; he expended his strength in conventions 
and newspaper work. In answer to his appeals 

7 



8 HORACE MANN 

schools sprang into being where there had been 
none before, and those already existing set about 
reforming their methods; school committees re- 
vived their lukewarm zeal; a generous ardor took 
possession of his countrymen, kindling their blood 
and arousing them from their inertia. It was, 
in short, a renaissance, a resurrection, a revival 
of the American public school. It was even more 
than this, — it was an actual creation, a new and 
almost final reorganization of the system of public 
education, as the United States has maintained 
and developed it, for over half a century. 

But before showing what Horace Mann accom- 
plished, we must relate briefly how he was fitted 
by education and character for this great work. 



The Life of Horace Mann previous to 1837 

Nothing in Mann's family and antecedents, 
nor in his childhood and youth, gives promise of 
the high destiny to which he was called, — that of 
a hero of education; nothing, unless it be a pre- 
cocious will power and a feverish ardor for knowl- 
edge. Born on a farm in Norfolk County on the 
4th of May, 1796, twenty years after the Declara- 
tion of Independence of the United States, here 
he lived until his twentieth year, engaged in the 
labors of the farm. "My childhood was not a happy 
one," he often said later. The death of his father 
in 1809, when he was only thirteen years old, im- 
poverished this humble household still more. He 
was obliged to work harder than ever to support 
the family, — a task in which his mother set him 
the example. "She was," we are told, "one of 
those sober, sensible, energetic New England women 
who bring to the dull, ceaseless routine of domestic 
drudgery the will and courage of actual heroines." 

Horace Mann educated himself by his own per- 

9 



10 HORACE MANN 

sonal efforts amid the solitude of the country 
and by daily intercourse with nature. His taste 
for reading developed early, and a fortunate cir- 
cumstance contributed to it. The little town 
of Franklin, one of those raw, newly built American 
towns which seem to have sprung from the soil 
like mushrooms, poor as it was in resources of every 
kind, possessed the embryo of a library, which it 
owed to the generosity of the great American for 
whom it was named. Franklin has somewhere 
related that he first thought of presenting a bell 
as an appropriate godfather's gift to the new- 
born hamlet. He changed his mind, however, on 
reflecting that the people of that region, as he 
knew them, preferred sense to sound, and he accord- 
ingly sent them a collection of books. 

Mann profited by this decision; on such trifles 
do human affairs depend. If Franklin had been 
a less judicious benefactor of the town to which 
he stood sponsor, Mann's lot might have turned 
out quite differently. He might have vegetated, 
ignorant and obscure, in his native village and 
never have been able to say in later life: "If it 
were in my power, I would scatter books broadcast 
over the land, as the sower scatters grain in the 
furrows of the field." The supply of books pre- 
sented by Franklin, chiefly works of theology and 



HORACE MANN 11 

ancient history, were, it is true, soon exhausted, 
but not before they had kindled the sacred fire 
in Mann's soul. In order to purchase others, the 
boy spent the small sums which he could earn 
with his own hands by weaving straw during the 
long winter evenings and selling his basket work. 
It was his solitary reading which turned the little 
rustic into a well-informed youth. The town- 
ship of Franklin boasted, indeed, a school, which 
Mann attended when he could be spared from 
the w T ork of the farm; that is to say, about eight 
or ten weeks of the year. But what a school! 
Mere mechanical teaching of the three R's, a simple 
exercise of memory, without the slightest appeal 
to the intelligence; a school, in short, which 
awaited, like so many others, the reforms which 
Mann was to introduce at a later day. 

The village church, in the quality of its religious 
instruction, was worth even less than the school. 
It was conducted by a fanatical preacher, Dr. 
Evans, an extra- or hyper-Calvinist, as Mann called 
him, whose only aim was to terrorize his flock 
by dismal pictures of future punishment in the 
next world. The youthful Mann, with the docility 
of his childish imagination, trembled and shud- 
dered like the rest under these terrifying threats 
of eternal perdition. But an event was to occur, 



12 HORACE MANN 

which completely revolutionized his ideas. At 
the age of twelve he lost a brother whom he tenderly 
loved, and in the anguish of his grief the boy 
learned to reflect. Guided by his heart, sustained 
by his growing reason, he was seized by an instinct 
of rebellion; he said to himself that it was not 
possible that his beloved brother should have to 
endure eternal punishment in another world; that 
the God he worshipped was not a monster of cruelty. 
He had reached a moment of moral crisis, almost 
such a night as Jauffray describes. "I remember, 
as if it were yesterday," he said long after, "the 
day, the hour, the place, the circumstances, in 
which I broke the chains which had bound me." 
From that hour dated for Mann the awakening 
of mind which was to lead to a sincere but very 
broad religious faith, moral rather than theological, 
and free from servitude to dogmas, of which some 
one has said: "What would be called religion in 
others, was morality in Mann." 

Mann's early education had been acquired a 
little at random, like that of Rousseau, but in 
the absolutely pure and innocent atmosphere of 
country life. It was from a wandering professor 
that he learned the rudiments of Latin. An 
ardent reader, he was at the same time a fervent 
worshipper of nature ; he loved to watch a glorious 



HORACE MANN 13 

sunrise, and at night stretched out on a grassy 
meadow to " feast his eyes on the starry heavens.' 7 

He had an intense natural love of beauty, and 
later, when he had become a pedagogue, he did 
not conceal his distrust of a purely bookish educa- 
tion. "It is a great mistake/ 7 he said, "to be a 
slave to books. The secret of education is not 
love of books, but love of knowledge. 77 

A poet lay dormant in him — he himself has 
said so — a tender enthusiastic poet who reveals 
himself in his flights of oratory and in his literary 
style, whether by dazzling wealth of imagery 
or by the lyrical expression of noble sentiments. 
Proud and high-souled, he was at the same time 
the most sensitive of men, uniting rare energy 
with deep tenderness of nature. When in his 
later life he was called upon at times to reprimand 
an unruly pupil, it was with difficulty that he could 
restrain his tears. 

In his family relations he showed the most 
exquisite delicacy of feeling; while his frankness 
and tenderness of nature gave infinite charm to 
his friendship. 

For thirty years he lived with his mother, taking 
care to shield her from all knowledge of his griefs 
and perplexities lest they should sadden her, and 
seeking by every means in his power to make 



14 HORACE MANN 

her life tranquil and happy. "The most exquisite 
emotion I have ever felt," he writes, "was in 
observing my mother's face brighten and her 
step grow lighter on hearing something good said 
of me, and to feel that this change in her bearing 
proceeded from a secret well-spring of pleasure 
which I had touched in her heart." 

One of the joys of his life was to return to Frank- 
lin and revisit the scenes of his childhood. He 
often made pilgrimages thither, and saw with 
emotions of melancholy the paternal roof, which 
had passed into strangers' hands. 

"Here lived my father whom I dimly remember 
and my mother whose memory is so much a part 
of me, and of whom I can say that if there is any 
good in me, I owe it to her." 

Two noble filial souls have expressed the same 
sentiments in kindred language at an interval of 
fifteen centuries. "From my father," said Mar- 
cus Aurelius, "I inherit modesty; to my mother 
I owe my piety." 

Mann carried into his friendships the same ten- 
derness as into his family ties. The list is long of 
the distinguished men with whom he held fra- 
ternal relations. Let us name first Dr. Howe, 
who has been called the Lafayette of Greek inde- 
pendence, having served as surgeon-in-chief to 



HORACE MANN 15 

the Greek army and navy during the revolution 
of 1822, and who, on his return to America, de- 
voted himself to founding and developing institu- 
tions for the blind, the deaf and dumb, and the 
feeble-minded. (It was he who educated the famous 
deaf, dumb, and blind girl, Laura Bridgman.) 

Channing, the celebrated leader of the Unitarian 
body, to which Mann himself belonged, 1 was also 
among his friends, as was Theodore Parker, the 
only preacher whom he enjoyed hearing, and 
who once wrote to him: " Spare your strength; 
remember that if you kill yourself, it will take the 
Lord a long time to give us another Horace Mann." 

To this list belongs also George Combe, the 
philosopher, of whom Mann was the disciple as 
well as friend, and many more to whom he was 
bound by community of sentiments and an equal 
enthusiasm for the cause of popular education. 
Edward Everett, who had been appointed governor 
of Massachusetts, actively seconded his efforts, 
as did Senator Sumner and the mayor of Boston, 
Josiah Quincy. 



1 The sect of Unitarians, whose origin we must seek in the 
England of the seventeenth century, is the most liberal of Amer- 
ican religious bodies. Its followers admit revelation without 
accepting all its dogmas. There are no less than 600 Unitarian 
congregations in America at the present day. 



16 HORACE MANN 

For his sister Mann cherished the warmest 
affection and a devotion of which he gave proof 
by coming to her aid in a serious crisis and saving 
her husband, a merchant who had failed in business, 
from financial ruin. She remained all her life the 
intimate confidante of his thoughts. 

What shall be said of his worship of her whom 
he had chosen as the companion of his life, and 
who was suddenly snatched from him by death 
after two brief years of perfect happiness? He 
had married her in 1831 after an engagement of 
ten years. Her loss left in his heart a wound that 
was long in healing. In his first grief he wrote: 
"My whole life was centred in the home which 
she brightened by her presence. 1 She imparted 
to me renewed strength for my work and inspired 
me with fresh motives for courageous activity. 
I should never end if I attempted to describe the 
revelation of moral beauty that flowed from her 
life and the grace of feeling which sprang like a deli- 
cate flower from the adamant of her virtues." 

The public-spirited citizen was in no respect 
inferior to the son, brother, and husband. As 
a lawyer Mann made it a rule to accept only just 
causes and to plead only for the truth ; as a mem- 

1 Mann's first wife was the daughter of Dr. Messer of Brown 
University, where he had been a student. 



HORACE MANN 17 

ber of the legislature and senator he rose above 
party politics, speaking only in behalf of public 
interests and great philanthropic causes. 

In 1816, at the age of twenty, Mann had become 
a regular student at Brown University, a small 
college founded in 1764 in the city of Providence. 
In order to pay his matriculation fees, he gave 
lessons as a tutor during the vacations, thus follow- 
ing a custom still prevalent among the poor students 
of American colleges, some of whom are reduced 
to the necessity of paying their way by seeking 
service as hotel waiters and the like during the 
summer. At Brown, Mann studied law, and dis- 
tinguished himself at once among his companions. 
His masters bore witness that he was the best stu- 
dent in the university and, at the same time, the 
best whist player. 

One trait already characterizes Mann's turn 
of mind and natural trend of thought, — he chose 
for his last scholastic thesis the following subject: 
"On the Progressive Character of the Human Race." 
It is this belief in progress, in the indefinite de-\ 
velopment of the moral and intellectual faculties \ 
of man, which was to be the watchword of his^ 
whole life and the motive of all his actions. 1 

1 Another of Mann's youthful writings was entitled " On the 
Duty of every American toward Posterity." 



18 HORACE MANN 

On the conclusion of his studies and after having 
held for some time a professorship of Latin and 
Greek literature at Brown University, Mann settled 
in Dedham, a small Massachusetts town, where 
he entered upon the practice of the law, pleading 
cases before the Norfolk and Boston bars. He 
was already in full possession of his oratorical 
powers. He was, according to the testimony of his 
biographers, a redoubtable orator, with a terrible 
power of sledge-hammer retorts, which he hurled 
at his adversaries like bombshells thrown into 
an enemy's camp. On the occasion of the national 
holiday, the 4th of July, 1824, Mann delivered 
an address which attracted the notice of John 
Quincy Adams, 1 future President of the United 
States, the same whom Mann was to succeed twenty- 
five years later as member of the House of 
Representatives. 

His reputation grew from year to year, until 
he had become the most highly esteemed lawyer 
in that region. It was in 1827 that the confidence 
of the electors of Norfolk County called him to 
a seat in the State legislature of Massachusetts. 



1 John Quincy Adams was President of the United States from 
1825-1829. A few years after the expiration of his term as Presi- 
dent, he was elected member of Congress from Massachusetts and 
continued to be elected until he died. 



HORACE MANN 19 

In 1830 he was elected State senator, then presi- 
dent of the Senate in 1836. 

The part he took in political assemblies was 
always a brilliant one. He preached as often as 
possible what he called his " gospel of temperance 
and education.' ' But his idealism did not divert 
him from a due concern for the material interests 
of his country. His two first speeches in Con- 
gress were respectively upon religious liberty and 
upon railroads. But the subjects which chiefly 
occupied his energies at this period, when he was 
in the habit of working sixteen hours a day, were 
the establishment of a lunatic asylum and the 
campaign against intemperance. After five years 
of constant effort Mann obtained from the House 
a vote for necessary funds to erect a commodious 
and suitable building, the Worcester asylum, where 
two hundred and thirty insane patients were to 
be received, treated with gentleness and humanity, 
and employed in agricultural pursuits. "We have 
overthrown the dungeons of inhumanity," he ex- 
claimed, on accomplishing this work; "the out- 
works are stormed at least, and some of the unhappy 
prisoners can now enjoy the beauty of the physical 
world, and before long I hope they will share the 
benefits of the moral world." In this humani- 
tarian enterprise Mann was not merely a promoter, 



20 HORACE MANN 

but, charged with organizing it personally, he 
gave proof of those administrative talents which 
he was to display some }^ears later in his scholastic 
campaign. Let us add that he found excellent 
associates to aid him; among others a woman, 
"the adorable" Miss Dix, to whom he paid this 
signal homage : 

"If Queen Victoria in one of her triumphal 
progresses through her states were to encounter 
this more than sovereign American woman on 
one of her charitable progresses, it is the former, 
not the latter, who ought to bend the knee and 
kiss the other's hand. Yes, the empress of so 
many millions of mankind should bow before 
this angel from heaven, sent down for the salvation 
of poor insane men and women." 

Mann was no less fortunate in his struggle against 
intemperance. Himself one of the most temperate 
of men, I do not know whether he had sworn to 
his mother, like Lincoln, never to touch intoxicat- 
ing liquors, but he did, in fact, abstain from doing 
so, lamenting that he found so few imitators. 
To plant a school near every dwelling and to re- 
move the saloon, such was his plan. "How many 
thousands of drunkards would never have become 
so if the saloon had been five miles away from 
their home!" 



HORACE MANN 21 

In 1832 Mann proposed a law forbidding the 
public sale of intoxicating liquors, at least on 
Sundays. The project received but two favorable 
votes, including, no doubt, his own. But he was 
not the man to let himself be discouraged by a first 
failure ; and thanks to his tenacity and his eloquence, 
the law was passed in 1837 by two hundred and 
forty votes to seventeen in the House of Repre- 
sentatives and twenty-three to six in the Senate. 
Thus fortune smiled on Mann's political career; 
he had become a power in the Massachusetts legis- 
lature, but beneath this brilliant surface, his private 
life held much of sadness. Since 1833 his home 
had been desolate, and he had never become rec- 
onciled to his loss. In the private journal to 
which he was accustomed to confide every evening 
the events of his life and his inmost thoughts, 
he speaks sadly of "days devoid of consolation 
and sleepless, tearful nights." Poverty had pur- 
sued him even amid his successes at the bar and 
in the House. Who could have imagined that 
for a period of six months the brilliant statesman, 
the busy lawyer, had only the means of dining once 
in two days. At this time he denied himself and 
incurred heavy debts in order to help his brother- 
in-law, who had failed. His health, which had 
been undermined by labor and privations, grew 



22 HORACE MANN 

daily worse, so that his friends at one time de- 
spaired of his life; and this man of forty-one 
years, who appeared to be broken down and utterly 
crushed, was about to recover his strength and 
energies at the call of an inner voice which sum- 
moned him to act in behalf of humanity, — in behalf 
of education for the people. He was about to 
devote himself exclusively to the cause of educa- 
tion and to enter upon a campaign in favor of 
schools, — a campaign of twelve years full of sacri- 
fices and efforts, the noblest, assuredly, which the 
annals of education have to offer us. 



II 

Horace Mann, Secretary of the Boston 
Bureau of Education 

On the 20th of April, 1837, Mann, in his capacity 
of president of the Massachusetts Senate, signed 
an official act relating to public schools which 
was to decide the future course of his life. By 
this act a board of education was established, whose 
primal object was to study and investigate the 
moral and material condition of the schools in order, 
subsequently, to discover and apply the best methods 
of improving them, the board being thus both an 
examining and a reforming body. A few months 
later Mann was appointed its secretary, and this 
modest title was to enable him to become for a 
long period the capable and indefatigable agent 
for the reorganization of the school system of his 
country. 1 

It was a great change in his life ; he now became 
the advocate for all men. "Let my new clients, 

1 Channing, the leading Unitarian divine, wrote to him: " I hear 
that you are about to devote yourself to the cause of education in 
our Republic. I rejoice over it." 

23 



24 HORACE MANN 

the rising generation, come to me/' he said. From 
the outset he had traced for himself a line of moral 
conduct, — "May God grant me to subdue my ego- 
tism and give me wisdom of mind and kindness 
of heart," — and at the same time he set before 
himself a course of action which he was to carry 
out as faithfully as the former. He sketched 
it in these terms in a letter to his sister: "If I can 
be the instrument of a reform which will settle 
how schools can be better taught, what are the 
best books, the best plans of study, the best methods 
of education; if I can discover by what means 
a child who does not speak, who does not think, 
who does not reflect, can surely become by means 
of education a noble citizen, ready to fight for 
the right and die for it, may I not flatter myself 
with the hope that I have not labored in vain?" 

And with that power of imagination which 
made the most distant events present to him, 
which showed him the future as if it already ex- 
isted, he dreamed of the harvest while he was 
sowing the seed. He beheld his beloved Massa- 
chusetts covered with flourishing schools, the other 
States of the Union following her example, and 
the whole human race regenerated by education! 

The faith which animated him was early im- 
planted in his soul; it was drawn from a double 



HORACE MANN 25 

source, — his devotion to men and his love of children. 
No one has spoken of childhood more tenderly 
than he: 

"How engaging children are in their happy 
unconsciousness ! Ignorant, when they must have 
knowledge in order to live ; absorbed in the present, 
when they are embarked for eternity; blind in 
the midst of perils; as unconscious of the noble 
enthusiasms and ardent passions which slumber 
in their breasts as the cloud is of the storm and 
thunder it hides in its bosom, — such are these 
cherished beings whose future is in our hands. . . ." 

Let us quote one more charming passage : 

"How did this fair child come to us so full of music 
and poetry ? Who put a whole dancing-school into 
his steps? At the least sound which arouses his 
gayety, he seems to throw off the law of gravita- 
tion ; he floats, he glides as if his body were a light 
feather and his soul a breeze playing with it. The 
child is the greatest of miracles ! . . ." 

How many times before becoming secretary 
of the Board of Education had Mann addressed 
to his countrymen moving appeals in behalf of 
instruction, such as he was about to renew un- 
ceasingly until he had brought them to feel as he 
did, until he had made them realize the importance 
of education, until he had carried them with him, 



26 HORACE MANN 

so that all should resolve to shed light and truth 
upon mankind "as God sheds sunshine and rain 
upon the earth ! " 

"How is this?" he cried. "If some one should 
bring you word to-morrow that he had found 
a coal mine which would bring in ten per cent, 
would you not hasten to invest in it? And yet 
here are men who might bring you in forty or 
fifty per cent, and you leave them grovelling in 
ignorance. You know how to make use of plants 
and animals, you can produce wheat from herd's- 
grass and turn the jackal into a dog; . . . and 
you have children of whom you can make nothing ! 

"You build hospitals, you establish law-courts. 
Why? To punish people for the ignorance which 
has made them criminals ; to harbor poor wretches 
who have failed here below for lack of instruction. 
But are you not yourselves -the unconscious authors 
and accomplices of these evils which you vainly seek 
to prevent or to cure? Build schools then; you 
will thus abolish ignorance, crime, and misery. 
You will quench hatred and make the happiness 
and greatness of the nation through the prosperity 
and morality of each of its citizens." 

The aim which Mann was pursuing by his personal 
efforts he had long since proposed to his countrymen. 
He had dreamed of it during his thoughtful child- 



HORACE MANN 27 

hood on the shores of the ocean, during his youth 
at Brown University when he delivered essays 
on human progress, in his manhood when he sat 
in the legislature. But at the moment when he 
was himself intrusted with the accomplishment 
of his dream, anxiety mingled with his enthusiasm. 
Men of ability are apt to distrust their own talents 
and powers. Should he prove capable of carry- 
ing on so great a mission and succeeding in an 
enterprise which was partly technical ? "I tremble, " 
he writes in his diary, "at the idea of this task 
which has fallen to me." His adversaries re- 
proached him, in fact, with a lack of scholastic 
experience. He had been, it is true, a tutor in 
Providence and a member of the school committee 
in Dedham. But these were slender qualifications 
beside the professional claims of his competitor 
for the office, Professor Carter, a teacher of long 
experience. The governing powers of Massachu- 
setts must have been fully persuaded of the pre- 
eminence of Mann's moral qualities when they 
chose him in preference to such a candidate. They 
had divined what miracles were to be expected 
from his untiring devotion and from such rare 
nobility of soul united with such admirable energy. 
Mann amply justified their confidence, and af- 
forded one more proof that it is not always one 



28 HORACE MANN 

of the trade, a professional, but on the contrary, 
an outsider who most frequently accomplishes the 
great reforms in education. 

That which added to the difficulties of Mann's 
work was the nature of the duties intrusted to 
him. Neither he nor the Board was invested 
with any executive power. He did not have 
that actual authority over schools and instructors 
which the State of New York, for instance, con- 
ferred on its superintendent of schools, an office 
created in 1835. 

The Boston Board deliberated, gave advice, 
expressed its wishes, but did not direct in school 
affairs. But the worth of institutions depends 
upon the men who form part of them. With 
a leader like Mann, who was its soul, the Board of 
Education exercised a decisive action, an ex- 
traordinary influence, over the school districts of 
Massachusetts and later of the whole Union, such 
as ministers of public instruction in other countries 
might have reason to envy. The following detail 
clearly shows how conscientiously Mann proceeded 
to fulfil the duties of his position. Before setting 
to work he entered upon a sort of pedagogical 
retreat, devoting a certain time to retirement 
and meditation. For several weeks he shut himself 
up in company with books on education; he read 



HORACE MANN 29 

and pondered over Miss Edgeworth's Practical Edu- 
cation and The Necessity for Popular Education 
by Dr. James Simpson. He took great pleasure 
in this reading, which he pronounced "delight- 
ful," and which furnished him with a store of new 
ideas. He convinced himself more and more fully 
that the educational mission on which he had 
entered was the one that best suited his tastes, 
feelings, and principles. This period of retirement 
and reflection was not of long duration, however. 
Mann received his appointment as secretary on 
the 30th of June, 1837. By the 28th of August 
of the same year he had opened the campaign 
with his first lecture tours. It was a brilliant 
beginning. In each of the fourteen counties of 
Massachusetts, Mann assembled conventions of all 
the friends of education, teachers, members of 
school committees from the three hundred districts 
in the State, leading members of the community; 
in short, all who were eager to listen to the burn- 
ing words of the great educator. Mann well knew 
that his first mission was to win souls, to arouse 
good-will, to create a current of opinion, to com- 
municate to others the enthusiasm with which 
he was himself possessed. It was at this price 
only that he could hope for success. He must 
obtain the moral support of all those interested 



30 HORACE MANN 

in the reform of schools, rouse from their torpor 
the old school committees, whose origin dated 
back to the seventeenth century. He must also 
secure the material support of wealthy citizens, 
from whom he solicited donations while awaiting 
the moment when these private liberalities should 
arouse the emulation of the State, from which he 
hoped later to obtain funds to endow the various 
scholastic establishments which he proposed to found. 
On the one hand, he must influence public opinion 
to desire and demand the necessary reforms; on 
the other hand, he must induce the legislatures 
of the country to vote for them and carry them 
into execution. A minister of education would 
have been able to draw up orders and sign decrees; 
Mann could only call conventions and draw up 
reports. His position -can be defined by saying 
that he was before all, not a philosopher, not a 
practical instructor, but a soldier, a tribune of 
education, a missionary who journeyed from town 
to town, from village to village, spreading his ideas 
and his faith, a Peter the Hermit preaching a cru- 
sade against ignorance. On his lecture tours Mann 
lavished his eloquence like an American Jean 
Mace, — a Jean Mace of greater powers as an 
orator and loftier flights. He often addressed 
different audiences for twenty-five successive days. 



HORACE MANN 31 

In that free American democracy which contains 
so many kings, — railroad kings, petroleum kings, 
and the rest, — Mann was the lecture king. We 
have since seen presidential candidates in the 
United States multiply themselves to a still greater 
extent, and under the spur of ambition pour forth 
an even greater number of speeches, but in the 
matter of scholastic addresses, disinterested speeches 
in the cause of education, Mann undoubtedly 
holds the record, not for his own country alone, 
but for the whole world. 

We must not imagine, however, that he met 
with constant success in these oratorical cam- 
paigns, which he carried on with so fine an ardor. 
His annual lecture trip was not invariably a tri- 
umphal progress. On one occasion he had an 
audience consisting of three ladies; another day, 
a humiliating day, he found himself alone ! He 
owns sadly that political speeches would have 
been better attended. "Politics," he added, "are 
the only god of this people." And he adds jestingly, 
"If a mob collects anywhere, instead of reading 
the riot act to disperse it, one has only to announce 
a lecture on education; that will be sufficient — 
not a soul will remain." 

Let us add that Mann, although a born orator, 
never addressed an audience without fear and 



32 HORACE MANN 

trembling. He had, moreover, to contend against 
physical weakness. On the eve of delivering three 
or four lectures in succession, he writes in his diary, 
"Alas for my poor body!" 

He carried on this propaganda with his pen as 
well as by speeches; he began publishing in 1838 
a scholastic newspaper called the Common School 
Journal, which he continued to conduct for ten 
years. He there set forth in detail his views on 
special questions relating to teaching and educa- 
tional methods. He thus led the way for all the 
pedagogical journals which have since flourished 
in the United States; notably, the Journal of Edu- 
cation which Barnard, the Horace Mann of Con- 
necticut, edited for thirty-one years. But it was, 
above all, by the publication of his reports that 
Mann exercised a marked influence on public 
opinion. The twelve statements which he drew 
up year after year are a genuine pedagogical monu- 
ment. They occupied about a thousand pages 
in the edition of his works. Issued in a large 
edition, about twenty thousand copies, they were 
circulated in all directions, read in remote hamlets 
as well as in great cities; people learned from 
them what schools were and what they ought to 
be. Officially addressed to the Board of Educa- 
tion, they were in reality destined for the people, 



HORACE MANN 33 

whom it was urgent to instruct as to the importance 
of education. In short, they were veritable scho- 
lastic manifestoes summoning public opinion to 
provide instruction for the people. 

Thus Mann's annual reports resume twelve years 
of intense labor and fruitful results; they have, 
in the first place, historic interest, exhibiting as 
they do the scholastic situation of the period 
before proceeding to relate what Mann did or 
attempted to do to improve it. If in the final 
pages of these reports he can justly celebrate the 
progress brought about by twelve years of labor, 
he frankly admits at the outset the condition 
of weakness and poverty into which the three 
hundred schools of Massachusetts had fallen. 1 The 
fault lay especially with the school committees, 
which fulfilled but negligently the wide functions 
which existing legislation had intrusted to them. 
They were to choose text-books, to decide upon 
the children too poor to purchase them, — to 

1 The history of American education proves how powerless the 
laws are when they are in advance of the manners and habits of a 
people. When Mann set about his work it was more than two 
hundred years since the first colonists of America had resolved to 
establish a sytem of gratuitous instruction (1630) and of obliga- 
tory instruction (1642). In 1647 it had already been decided that 
there should be a primary school for every fifty families, and a 
higher school for every hundred families, but nothing of the kind 
existed. 



34 HORACE MANN 

whom they should be furnished gratuitously, — 
to visit each school once a month. It was also 
their mission to preside over the choice of teachers, 
and to make sure that those selected were the 
best it was possible to secure "as guardians of that 
inestimable treasure, — the children of the district." 
But ineffectual as are our own school committees 
(appointed to insure the execution of the law of 
obligatory attendance) the American committees 
seem to have discharged their duties very little 
better. School inspections were not carried out 
seriously. The committee man too often con- 
tented himself with a brief call in the course of 
a country drive or a business trip, during which 
he fastened his horse at the gate, entered the school- 
house to rest and warm himself, and this done, 
his inspection was over. 

Like a physician who thoroughly studies all 
the symptoms of a disease before attempting its 
cure, Mann took careful note of all the defects 
and vices of the system he was attempting to 
reform, and in the highly unflattering picture he 
draws of the situation, he addresses many re- 
proaches to the committees. They do not pay 
sufficient attention, he says, to the choice of school- 
books, and they authorize too great a number; 
they do not take sufficient precautions in nominat- 



HORACE MANN 35 

ing teachers, of whom two-thirds are incapable, 
not having passed the examinations required by 
law. The school attendance is most irregular, 
a third of the pupils being absent during the winter 
months, and two-fifths during the summer; the 
schoolhouses are poor and out of repair; the me- 
chanical system of instruction is the only one in 
favor; and, finally, the salaries of both men and 
women teachers are insufficient, being about twenty- 
five dollars for men and eleven for women. But 
what vexed Mann's enthusiastic soul more than 
all was the apathy of the people, who seemed 
generally indifferent to school matters and un- 
concerned for the education of their children; 
and recalling the doctrine of Cousin, "As are 
teachers, so are schools/ ' the American educator 
proposed to alter it to, "As are parents, so are 
schools and teachers." 

These twelve reports of Mann's are a world in 
themselves. All the essential questions of educa- 
tion are considered and settled in turn in this vast 
compendium of theoretical pedagogy, over which 
we shall cast a rapid glance. The reader will 
be especially struck by the breadth and largeness 
of Mann's views, but he will soon be made aware 
that the secretary of the Boston Board did not 
lose himself amid vague speculations. Mann was 



36 HORACE MANN 

not a mere preacher of the ideal, he was an Ameri- 
can, and consequently positive and practical; the 
most minute questions of material organization 
interest him equally with the loftiest problems of 
moral training; he discusses the schoolroom desks 
and benches with as much care and competence 
as the philosophic principles of discipline. In 
his first report, Mann deals with ventilation, 
lighting, and heating; he wants no more school- 
rooms where the wind and rain can enter and the 
ink freeze in the ink-stands. He is anxious to place 
these, whom he calls his eighty thousand Massachu- 
setts children, in healthful and hygienic surroundings. 
In his second report, he examines the methods 
of instruction in reading, and condemns the alpha- 
betical process, which consists in spelling by letters, 
for which he would substitute the "word method," 
which consists in teaching combinations of syllables 
and words which recall to the child familiar objects 
and attractive ideas. 

In the third report, after referring to child labor 
in factories, Mann points out the importance of 
libraries and the influence which reading exerts over 
the character. In the fourth, he treats of school 
attendance, and insists upon the necessity of divid- 
ing the pupils of each school into graded classes. 

The fifth introduces us to more general questions. 



HORACE MANN 37 

Mann therein sets forth the benefits of education 
and shows how it enriches men materially, being 
not only a source of moral wealth, but "an impor- 
tant factor in economics." " Wealth always follows 
intelligence; the hand is another and a better 
hand when knowledge guides it." The sixth re- 
port is devoted almost exclusively to a special 
subject, to which Mann attached the highest im- 
portance, one of his favorite theses, — the necessity 
of giving physiology a place among school studies. 
On this point Herbert Spencer has merely followed 
in Mann's steps. "Whence comes it," says Mann, 
"that one-quarter of the children who come into 
the world die before reaching the age of one year, 
unless it results from general ignorance of the 
laws of life?" And still associating economic 
reasons with sentiments of humanity, he adds: 
"Infractions of physiological laws kill millions 
of men and destroy millions of dollars." 

The seventh report, which attracted great atten- 
tion, is an account of the tour which Mann made in 
1843 through various European countries; he also 
considers here the question of corporal punishment 
and the difficulties arising from the excessive 
cultivation of the verbal memory. 

In the report of 1844 Mann devotes himself 
to the development of an idea which was dear to 



38 HORACE MANN 

him, — the employment of women as teachers ; he 
also attacks the question of normal schools and 
that of the study of vocal music. 

The ninth report, that of 1845, is one of the 
most important. Mann here points out to what 
motives, — school motives, — to what principles of 
action, discipline and moral training should in 
his opinion appeal. He desires that the obedience 
of pupils should in future be founded on affection 
and respect, not upon fear. He lays bare the 
dangers of jealousy and envy arising from emu- 
lation; and, passing from modes of discipline to 
methods of instruction, he follows Pestalozzi in 
asking that induction be substituted for deduction, 
the personal research of an awakened intelligence 
for the mechanical tasks of slavish memorizing. 

In 1846, satisfied with the results so far attained, 
Mann allows himself to review the past and pro- 
ceeds to write a history of the Massachusetts schools 
from their origin in those early days when the 
Pilgrim Fathers brought with them from Europe 
to the virgin soil of America their Puritan faith 
and their ideal of civic independence. 

Returning the following year to the influence 
and effects of education, he shows how it can cure 
social evils, vices, and crimes; and, finally, in a 
twelfth report, the summing up and, as it were, 



HORACE MANN 39 

the climax of all the rest, he raises a paean of victory 
and celebrates once more the virtues of the public 
schools. 

Assuredly the twelve reports of Mann are 
rather the work of a man of action, of an educa- 
tional leader, than of a philosopher or a pedagogue 
who originates methods. But they were admirably 
adapted to his aim, which was to arouse the popular 
mind and make educational questions the order of 
the day in his country. "How many dead minds 
there are to resuscitate!" he exclaimed. Doubt- 
less he experienced many disappointments; his 
flaming words often fell upon stony hearts; 
he was confronted with inertia and indifference. 
"When I am about to present my gospel of educa- 
tion in some new place, I feel as if I were standing 
in bad weather before the door of a house and 
vainly pulling the bell, with no one at home or all 
too busy to see me." But little by little, thanks 
to his persistence, the people awoke; the door was 
opened. 

"There is not one city," he said, some years 
later, "in which I have not found warm friends 
of education — everywhere there are a few, in 
some places their name is legion." In drawing 
up his reports Mann first made use of his own 
observations, of all the facts and ideas he had 



40 HORACE MANN 

collected in the course of his official tours and his 
personal investigations. But indefatigable worker 
as he was, he excelled also in the art of making 
others work. He caused to be sent to him each 
year by the school committees more than three 
hundred local reports, — as many as there were dis- 
tricts in the State; and thanks to these regular 
communications, he was thoroughly well posted. 

But in order to inform himself still more fully, 
he appealed to volunteer co-workers, and applied 
successfully the method which has since become 
extremely popular in America, and which in our 
own day an attempt has been made to introduce 
into France: that of sending circulars or sets of 
questions upon various subjects addressed to com- 
petent persons. Thus, in 1841, he made an inquiry 
by correspondence into the subject of which he 
had treated in his fifth report. He inquired of 
business men, merchants, manufacturers, their opin- 
ions as to education from an economic point of 
view. 

Similarly, in 1847, he proposed the following 
questions: "What influence may the school have 
on the morality of the pupils? Under the in- 
fluence of the best systems of education which 
we are able to establish to-day, in what proportion 
can we hope that the children attending the schools 



HORACE MANN 41 

will become honorable men, honest merchants, 
conscientious jurymen, incorruptible legislators, 
electors, and magistrates, good parents, good neigh- 
bors, and useful citizens? What number, on the 
other hand, will remain refractory to all efforts 
made to preserve them from vice? What pro- 
portion out of a hundred of these children are 
liable to become drunkards, gamblers, tramps, 
rioters, thieves, slanderers, murderers?" Mann dis- 
tributed this circular among such of his country- 
men as were best qualified to pronounce an opin- 
ion, notably to David Page, Solomon Adams, 
Roger Howard, Catherine Beecher. All replied 
that the influence of the school might be supreme, 
and this unanimous testimony filled Mann with 
delight. 

Of all Mann's reports the one which attracted 
the most notice was the seventh, in which he gave 
an account of his journey to Europe in 1843. Mann 
had married, on the 1st of May of that year, Mary 
Peabody, who, like her sister Elizabeth, had devoted 
herself to the work of education. This European 
trip was their wedding journey. It was to be also 
a rest tour for Mann, who was so much exhausted 
by his labors and struggles that he had begun to 
ask himself whether he should have strength to 
carry on his work. His brain was so excited by 



42 HORACE MANN 

a perpetual, feverish activity that "it worked of 
itself," according to an expression of Dr. Howe. 

Finally, it was a tour for study, the traditional 
European tour, which Barnard, who constantly 
emulated Mann, was to accomplish in his turn 
two years later, in 1845. How many have since 
followed in their steps! During his six months 
of travel, Mann interested himself with a lively 
curiosity in all the sights which the Old World 
offered to his astonished eyes. His journal is 
full of brilliant descriptions, whether of the monu- 
ments, museums, churches, which he visited, or of 
the historic sights and scenery which he gazed 
at in passing. But it is especially the philan- 
thropic establishments — the hospitals, prisons, 
houses of reform for young culprits, asylums for 
the blind and deaf and dumb, and, above all, the 
schools — which attracted his attention. On this 
last point he does full justice to the Old World, 
praising the schools of Scotland and especially 
those of Germany to such an extent that he seriously 
offended the national pride of his countrymen. 
At Halle he admires Francke's Institute, with its 
three thousand pupils, at that time under the direc- 
tion of Niemeyer; and he respectfully salutes the 
statue of its founder, the pedestal of which bears 
the simple inscription: "He had faith in God." 



HORACE MANN 43 

At Darmstadt he is surprised to learn from the 
director of schools that fortunate Germany had 
no difficulties to encounter in regard to school 
attendance and regularity on the part of the pupils, 
because " German children are born with the innate 
idea that they are to go to school." "With us," 
Mann adds sadly, "the school records of present 
and absent prove that this instinct is unknown 
to the American child." In Berlin, at Groningen 1 
in Prussia, in Saxony especially, Mann found 
occasion for praising and extolling, not perhaps 
without a strain of exaggeration, the qualities of 
German instructors. 

"All the defects of the German schools," he 
wrote, "find their corrective in the qualities of 
the masters. If one could bring together all those 
whom I have visited in their schools, they would 
form one of the finest assemblages of men I have 
ever met. Full of intelligence, of dignity, and 
gentleness, they give by their manners and bear- 
ing the impression of conscientious devotion to 
duty. In our American schools, where we often 

1 In these two cities, Mann, who had always been deeply inter- 
ested in the deaf and dumb language, ascertained that articulate 
speech had already been substituted for the old system of a sign 
language. On his return to America, he attempted to popularize the 
use of the new method, but without success. Articulate speech 
was not to be introduced in America until twenty-six years later, 
when it was taught in Boston. 



44 HORACE MANN 

have recourse to women as teachers, one of the 
chief arguments in favor of this practice is that 
women are gentler, more affectionate and encourag- 
ing than men. In Germany this argument would 
not be understood, or rather the facts which justify 
it with us do not exist there. Indeed, I have 
never seen in the German schools a single instance 
of harshness or severity; all is encouragement, 
animation, sympathy. I have seen hundreds of 
schools and thousands of pupils, but I have never 
met one pupil who underwent punishment in my 
presence." 

There is certainly some exaggeration here; 
gentleness has never been claimed as the chief 
quality of German schoolmasters. In the pres- 
ence of the visiting inspector or of a stranger 
taking notes, teachers and pupils are alike on 
their guard and do not always show themselves 
in their true light. With some naivete Mann 
judged by appearances. He was also delighted 
to observe what joy the German masters mani- 
fested when their pupils replied correctly to the 
questions put to them. "I have seen a master 
in his gratification at a correct answer clasp his 
pupil in his arms and caress him with paternal 
tenderness, as if unable to repress his joyful 
emotion. ..." 



HORACE MANN 45 

Mann fortunately discovered other more inter- 
esting and genuine features of German education: 
the methods by which reading was taught, writing 
treated as a branch of drawing, geography as- 
sociated with history and the natural sciences, 
the importance accorded to singing in schools. 

Enthusiastic over Germany to such an extent 
that some of his countrymen, on reading his account 
of his journey, nicknamed him "the Prussian/ ' 
Mann was, on the other hand, decidedly severe 
toward the French schools. We need not wonder 
at this; for in spite of the progress achieved since 
the Guizot law was passed in 1833, we were still 
at that time far behind Germany. The French 
character seems, moreover, to have inspired in him 
more distrust than sympathy. Ten years later, 
in 1853, after the Napoleonic coup d'etat, he wrote 
to his friend Combe: "What do you think of 
France ? Frivolity, sensualism, Catholicism — from 
these three causes united, what may not be the 
issue debasing to humanity?" 

In 1843 Mann could see in our people only their 
defects: the military spirit of a nation eager for 
glory and conquest, heir to the ambitions of 
a Napoleon — and yet he visited France during the 
peaceful reign of Louis Philippe. Read, for ex- 
ample, what he writes after a visit to the park and 



46 HORACE MANN 

palace of Versailles, of which he remarks, how- 
ever, that they surpass in extent and splendor 
all that he has yet seen in Europe. "The palace 
of Versailles contains a gallery where the history 
of France is told in painting. One sees there 
pictures representing all Napoleon's great battles, 
portraits of marshals of France, admirals, and 
kings. Everything breathes of war; a warlike 
flame blows over it; all is red with the blood of 
battles. You would call it rather a temple dedicated 
to Mars than the work of a civilized nation in the 
nineteenth century of the so-called Christian era. 
We should have said beforehand that it was im- 
possible for such a work to have been conceived, 
but when we know the French character thoroughly, 
we say, on the contrary, that it was impossible 
for such a work not to have been done. It is 
only at rare intervals that we come across some 
scattered memorials which recall the philosophers, 
the sages, the philanthropists. All this is done 
merely to cultivate and develop a passion for the 
criminal glory of war. . . ." 

If Mann were living now, he would perhaps 
be obliged to modify somewhat his judgment of 
France and it is for American imperialism that 
he would doubtless reserve some of his bitterest 
censures. On the whole, he returned from his 



HORACE MANN 47 

travels with mingled impressions. The moral sit- 
uation of Europe, its political and social institu- 
tions, were not of a nature to suit either his republi- 
canism or his virtue. He saw in them the result 
of long centuries of ignorance, superstition, and 
tyranny; he was aghast at the immorality dis- 
played in the great cities. 

"The children in certain quarters of Manchester 
and London are surrounded by such baleful in- 
fluences and such abominable examples that they 
may be said to have been born to be imprisoned, 
transported, or hung as surely as wheat grows to 
be eaten." 

And so from the heart of Europe, seeing all its 
vices at close range and recalling America only 
by its virtues, he reverted with pride to the memo- 
ries of his beloved country; he evoked the shades 
of the forefathers landing on Plymouth Rock; he 
venerated them as if they had carried away from 
Europe all the goodness there when they set forth 
to build schoolhouses and churches amid the newly 
cleared forests, that they might thus keep the sacred 
flames of learning and piety still burning. 

On his return to Boston, however, Mann was 
destined to discover once again that all was not 
for the best in the best of Americas, that the noblest 
intentions could be misunderstood and travestied 



48 HORACE MANN 

there, and that the spirit of piety inherited from 
the Puritan forefathers might also have its defects 
and inconveniences. In the genuine ardor of his 
convictions, he had perhaps dreamed of a progress 
without opposition, a mild and peaceable admin- 
istration inspired by his kindly spirit and eagerly 
accepted by all. He was soon undeceived ; violent 
opposition and bitter quarrels awaited him, partly 
religious and political, and partly professional. 
It was especially after his European trip that the 
storm burst; but from the start Mann's work had 
been confronted by bitter opponents, among whom 
was the Rev. Mr. Smith, a rabid Calvinist, who re- 
minded him by his fanaticism of Parson Evans 
of the Franklin church, and whom he dubbed "an 
indomitable hyena." 

History, it is said, repeats itself from age to age. 
What is not less true is, that it repeats itself from 
country to country. Separated by oceans though 
they may be, the same plants spring up, the same 
passions rage on either shore. Mann encountered 
in his country the same violent opposition which 
in our own day and our own land have prevailed 
against the organizers of common school or primary 
instruction. In the Massachusetts of fifty years 
ago, as in France for the last twenty years, sec- 
tarians have declaimed against what the}' call 



HORACE MANN 49 

"godless schools." The organization of the public 
school, of the American " civic school," as Mann 
conceived it, strongly resembles in its origin the 
establishment of lay schools in France. Up to 
the beginning of the nineteenth century, the schools 
of New England, the old Puritan schools, had 
remained subject to the Church; the ministers 
of religion visited them frequently and gave in- 
struction in the catechism. Calvinism, at that 
time the dominant, in fact, the only faith, reigned 
supreme. The New England Primer, the reading- 
book placed in the hands of the children, was 
steeped in Calvinist doctrines. 

For this sectarian school ruled by the Church, or 
rather the churches, since orthodoxy had become 
dismembered into several distinct sects, — Mann 
had sought to substitute an undenominational 
school, religious still, no doubt, since he recom- 
mended the reading of the Bible and esteemed 
it a work of inestimable value in forming the char- 
acters of the young, — but independent of all de- 
nominational teaching and severed from those 
sects which divided between them the dominion 
over souls. 

In France, it is the philosophical and lay mind 
which has succeeded tardily in separating the 
school and the Church; in the United States, 



50 HORACE MANN 

it is from the diversity of religious beliefs, from 
the multiplicity of Christian churches, that the 
same movement has emanated. As long as Cal- 
vinism was dominant, there had been no difficulty 
in accepting the teaching of one exclusive doctrine 
in the schools; but when Baptists, Methodists, 
Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Unitarians 
began to divide the allegiance of the Christian 
congregations, each of these sects, being no longer 
able to rule alone in the schools, naturally sought 
to eliminate all rival beliefs and to secularize in- 
struction in the public schools, open as they were 
to children of all seqts and conditions. 

But this logical conclusion, to which the di- 
versity of religious opinions would seem to lead, 
was not yet admitted in Mann's time. The ortho- 
dox sects, moreover, had not yet resigned them- 
selves to the loss of their supremacy. Mann was 
an object of suspicion in their eyes, — he was a Uni- 
tarian; that is to say, what the most advanced 
liberal Protestants are with us. He eliminated 
creeds and was at bottom a rationalist, remaining 
a Christian in spirit only, not according to the 
letter. 

Did he not give the worst possible example to 
the young by abstaining from attendance at public 
worship? It was remarked that on a certain 



HORACE MANN 51 

Sunday he had failed to be present at any religious 
service in the city where he had gone to lecture: 
this was regarded as intolerable. Mann excused 
himself, and perhaps aggravated his offence, by 
remarking that as there were three churches of 
different faiths in the town in question and he 
had not attended any of them, he had committed 
the offence with which he was charged three times 
over. 

As to the essential basis of the discussion, he 
reminded his opponents that the legislative act 
of 1827 had interdicted in the American schools 
the use of books imbued with the spirit of any sect 
whatever, and that accordingly he was, on the 
whole, conforming to the law. Already in 1840 
the sectarians in Massachusetts had opened the 
conflict against Mann in the legislature. His friend 
Everett was no longer there to defend him. The 
moment appeared a favorable one for attacking 
the liberals, as a wind of reaction was abroad in 
the country. The United States in the ascending 
march of their free democracy have known more 
than one 16th of May. They had not been spared 
the swing of the pendulum and the return to 
power of the conservative party. The State of 
New York had at this time actually abolished 
the office of superintendent of schools which it 



52 HORACE MANN 

had created several years previous. In Connecticut 
a political reaction had deprived Barnard of his 
position as superintendent. Why should not Mas- 
sachusetts follow their example by suppressing 
its Board of Education? Religious animosities 
sought disguise under political pretexts. The Board, 
that product of freedom, was represented as a dan- 
gerous instrument of centralization, an organ of 
despotic authority opposed to the spirit of Ameri- 
can institutions. In spite of all this agitation 
"the bigots," as Mann called them, were defeated 
by 245 to 182 votes. Does not this recall the 
doubtful victories which Jules Ferry won in 1880, 
when he barely obtained from the Senate by 
small majorities the vote for the school laws? 

Mann had not only to struggle against religious 
fanaticism and to repel the assaults of the odium 
theologicum. To the orthodox sectarians were 
joined the defenders of routine and tradition in 
education. It was in 1843 and 1844 that the storm 
burst forth with peculiar violence, excited by the 
publication of Mann's report on his return from 
abroad, in which he set forth the pedagogical 
superiority of the Old World. The school-teachers 
of Boston, to the number of thirty-one, banded 
themselves against him. They had never for- 
given him his appointment as secretary of the 



HORACE MANN 53 

Board of Education in place of a professional 
teacher. And now was it to be calmly endured 
that an American should remark, among many 
similar observations, that when he beheld the 
activity of masters and pupils in European schools, 
the schools of his own country seemed to him, in 
comparison, like dormitories, and the pupils like 
11 hibernating animals — actual marmots"? 

Accordingly, the Boston professors on the plea 
of patriotic sentiment proceeded to draw up a 
species of arraignment against the Board and its 
secretary. Their appeal was undoubtedly ad- 
dressed to the national pride, wounded by the pref- 
erence which Mann avowed for European schools, 
but at bottom it was tradition with all its array 
of prejudices which had risen against this innovator. 

And it must be added that the professors in 
their campaign against Mann were joined by the 
authors and editors of classical school-books, who 
felt their interests threatened, and who resented 
statements like the following: " There are at this 
moment three hundred text-books in use where 
twenty or thirty would be sufficient." Teachers 
are, as a rule, conservative in spirit and opposed 
to innovations; those of Boston were peculiarly 
so, by reason of the exceptional position which 
their early fame had given them throughout the 



54 HORACE MANN 

country. They were justly proud of their schools, 
of which it had been said that they were the " glory 
and pride of Massachusetts." Faithful to their 
traditions, and feeling that they had carried the 
time-honored system to perfection, they could 
not conceive of any change as desirable or any 
progress as possible. They had done very well 
without a board of education for two hundred 
years; they could do without it still. Mann had 
come with his bold undertakings, upsetting estab- 
lished institutions and disturbing time-honored 
customs. His free and ardent speech, his mind 
eager in quest of novelties, unsettled the general 
tranquillity, and what authority had he for so 
doing ? He was a mere amateur philosopher, med- 
dling in matters of education of which he knew 
nothing, without practical experience or scholastic 
antecedents, — a lawyer astray amid pedagogues! 
And while formulating their grievances, the one 
and thirty Boston pedagogues at the same time 
multiplied their accusations. Not one of the in- 
novations attempted by Mann found favor in their 
eyes. Normal schools were useless, since there 
had always been a supply of good teachers without 
them. Have we not encountered similar opposi- 
tion in France in 1880 and 1881 when the govern- 
ment of the Third Republic inaugurated the higher 



HORACE MANN 55 

normal schools of Fontenay and Saint-Cloud? 
Mann replied that one of the essential duties of the 
State was to take efficacious measures to guarantee 
the professional education of schoolmasters. "The 
school committees/' he said, "are like sentinels 
stationed at the door of every schoolhouse to make 
sure that only the best teachers whom it is possible 
to procure shall enter." 

The new methods of discipline, as Mann under- 
stood it, were incriminated. The schoolmasters 
were of the same opinion as the theologian Smith : 
they regretted to see banished from the schools 
religion — and the lash! 

Yet on this point Mann did not show himself 
intractable. He undoubtedly considered it the 
duty of masters to rule by reason and the heart, 
by arousing the highest sentiments and motives 
of action, but in extreme cases, where moral sua- 
sion proved insufficient, where the charms of knowl- 
edge and the interest of study were not enough 
to secure order and industry, he admitted, as did 
Locke, that recourse should be had to corporal 
punishment. These violent attacks of his adver- 
saries acted injuriously upon Mann and irritated 
him to the point of affecting his health. It is at 
this period that he wrote to a physician, a friend 
of his: "Can you do anything for a patient who 



56 HORACE MANN 

has not slept for three weeks? I feel an inex- 
tinguishable fire inside my brain, continually blaz- 
ing, like the flame of dry wood blown by the wind." 

Mann was undoubtedly kind and gentle by 
nature, and in the language of phrenology, which 
was so dear to him, he had the "bump" of be- 
nevolence highly developed. But on this occasion, 
stung to the quick by the unjust strictures of 
his opponents, he lost patience. Not content, 
in his replies, with defending himself, he attacks 
in his turn, and assumes the offensive with con- 
siderable temper and acrimony. He lashes the 
partisans of routine and does not spare insulting 
epithets. " There are owls," he cries, "who, to 
suit the universe to their blind eyes, would prevent 
the sun from rising." 

Mann suffered therefore in this campaign which 
was being waged against him; but some good 
resulted to the cause which he was defending. 
Public opinion received a fresh impulse ; attention 
was brought to bear upon the Boston public 
schools; the pupils were subjected to a public 
examination, and the defects in their instruction 
were pointed out. Henceforth, the masters stood 
alone in regarding them as perfect. It was shown, 
for example, that the practice of flogging as a 
punishment exceeded all bounds. To remedy this 



HORACE MANN 57 

evil, the school committee ordered that in future 
a register of punishments should be kept under 
supervision. A short time after, Mann learned 
with satisfaction that corporal punishment had 
diminished twenty-five per cent. 

But Mann's ardor was not directed merely 
toward reforming existing schools; it showed it- 
self also in important new creations, notably in 
the establishment of normal schools. Mann is the 
actual founder of the United States normal schools, 
which to-day number one hundred and seventy-eight, 
public and private. He established three in Mas- 
sachusetts. Henry Barnard followed his example 
in Connecticut in 1839. The State of New York 
in its turn founded that of Albany, whose first 
principal was the celebrated David Page. In 
Mann's eyes no other question equalled this in 
importance. 

"I regard normal schools as a new instrument 
of progress for the improvement of the human 
race. I consider that without them the public 
schools would lose their strength and power for 
good and become mere charity schools. Neither 
the art of printing, nor freedom of the press, nor 
free suffrage could long subsist for useful and 
salutary ends if schools for the education of teachers 
ceased to exist. In fact, if we allow the character 



58 HORACE MANN 

and talents of school-teachers to be lowered, the 
schools will become poor, and poor schools will 
form poor minds, and the free press will become 
a lying and licentious press, and the ignorant 
elector will become a venal elector until, under 
the outward form of a republic, a set of depraved 
and criminal men will govern the country." 

In 1839 and 1840 three normal schools were 
founded at Mann's suggestion: one at Lexington 
for women teachers only, the two others at Barre 
and Bridge water for both sexes. 

Undertaken provisionally and as an experiment, 
they were only definitely established on the 2d of 
March, 1842, when the legislature voted an annual 
sum for their maintenance. It was a welcome 
day to Mann and was not without a morrow, since 
on the 3d of March the House voted a further 
grant for school libraries. 

" Never," he wrote, "have brighter days dawned 
upon our cause. The delight which I feel at the 
success of our plans does not grow less and will 
have a salutary effect upon my health and spirits. 
The painful toil, which I have undergone for years, 
has been like a vampire sucking the blood from 
my heart and the marrow from my bones. I feel 
now that my strength will revive, and I shall be 
able to do more and better work." 



HORACE MANN 59 

Normal schools, however, had a very modest 
beginning in Massachusetts. In Lexington, on 
the opening day, only three young girls inscribed 
their names. The term of study was to be of one 
year only, as it was with us at the opening of 
Fontenay-aux-Roses. These new institutions did 
not lack critics; they were accused, in the first 
place, of drawing pupils away from the acad- 
emies, — those colleges for intermediate instruction 
which up to this time had supplied with more or 
less success the men and women teachers for the 
primary schools. These critics refused to admit 
that popular education required for the professional 
training of its teachers special schools distinct 
from those where general culture was combined 
with a solid technical education, ^hat wonder 
that the views of these opponents of the movement 
found credit among Mann's contemporaries, when 
in our own day we have witnessed advanced 
minds demanding the suppression of our one hundred 
and sixty normal schools, which are, nevertheless, 
among the finest orks of the Third Republic, and 
proposing to transfer the training of instructors to 
the Lycees and universities? 

On the other hand, Mann found himself sur- 
rounded by enthusiastic adherents. Already in 
1837 the Rev. Charles Brooks had accompanied 



60 HORACE MANN 

him on his lecture tours and supported him in his 
campaign in behalf of the normal school with 
such ardent zeal that the opposition newspapers 
published caricatures in which Mr. Brooks was 
depicted as a coachman, whip in hand, driving 
a team of school-teachers toward a normal school 
in the clouds. . . . 

The American normal school, however, de- 
scended from the clouds to the solid earth, thanks 
to the efforts of Mann and his friends, and also to 
the generosity of a good citizen, Mr. Edmund 
Dwight, who offered a donation of $10,000 toward 
the professional training of school masters and 
mistresses, on condition that the State should 
contribute a like sum. This method has since 
become a popular one among wealthy patrons of 
education in the United States. These benefactors 
are in the habit of offering one or two millions, or 
even more, for the founding of a university or library, 
provided that the government or other donors 
shall provide an equal sum; and this measure 
invariably succeeds, thereby justifying the familiar 
saying that it is only the first step that costs. Ed- 
mund Dwight was neither a Carnegie, a Rocke- 
feller, nor a Leland Stanford. The America of 
1838 had not yet witnessed those princely dona- 
tions which in our day have sometimes exceeded 



HORACE MANN 61 

a million dollars. Nevertheless, Mr. Dwight's gift 
of $10,000 caused deep joy, " indescribable joy," 
to Horace Mann. 

Another and different form of good luck attended 
him in the foundation of his normal schools. He 
had the rare fortune to be able to lay his hand upon 
a number of distinguished men to start and direct 
them ; among whom we may name Samuel Newman, 
Nicholas Tillinghast, and that incomparable edu- 
cator, Cyrus Pierce. Mann discovered the latter 
during one of his tours of inspection in 1837 on 
the little island of Nantucket, where Pierce had 
for many years been conducting schools which 
Mann pronounced the best in Massachusetts, schools 
in which order and discipline were maintained 
solely by an appeal to the conscience of the scholars. 

At the Lexington Normal School Pierce accom- 
plished wonders. On September 14, 1845, Mann 
wrote in his private journal: "I have passed the 
whole day in Mr. Pierce's school, and a most agree- 
able day it was. I had already formed a high 
opinion of his talents, but he surpassed my ex- 
pectations both in the art of teaching and in that 
gift which is the real condition of success in all 
instruction, — that of gaining the confidence of his 
pupils. I have seen nothing like it in any other 
school." 



62 HORACE MANN 

Pierce was a second Mann, with the same up- 
rightness, the same lofty ideals, the same devotion 
to his work, in which he wore himself out. " With- 
out him," wrote Barnard, "the cause of normal 
schools would have been lost for many years." 
At the close of each of his classes he repeated to 
his scholars: "Children, live for truth!" An old 
normal student of Lexington wrote: "The walls 
of our school have so often echoed these words 
that were they to crumble to pieces, we should 
still hear, sounding above the crash of their fall, 
"Live for truth!" 

Mann used the same language: "There is no 
treasure comparable to truth; there is no such 
source of happiness as truth; there is no cure for 
misfortune like truth. ..." 

Another of Mann's important works was the 
formation of school libraries. He took the utmost 
pains to develop a taste for reading and to place 
good books within reach of all, even in the remotest 
villages. "There is at this day," he wrote, "only 
a seventh part of the population provided with 
opportunities for reading, while for the majority, 
who do not know how to read and have no means of 
obtaining books, it is actually as if printing had 
never been invented." His joy was therefore 
great when he obtained from the legislature in 



HORACE MANN 63 

1842, a grant for the purpose of purchasing books 
for each school district. He hailed this decision 
as an event of the utmost importance, second only 
to that act of 1647, by which public schools were 
founded by the State. The small sum of fifteen 
dollars was allotted to each community, which 
should subscribe an equal sum for the foundation 
or maintenance of a local library. In case the 
children of the district numbered twice or thrice 
the minimum of sixty, the sum was to be doubled 
or trebled. The school library, as Mann under- 
stood it, was to be open to parents as well as to 
children. "When the schoolhouse is well provided 
with books/' he said, "grown men will again turn 
their steps thither." He wished them to be es- 
tablished everywhere, even in the smallest villages ; 
"so that in future there shall not be a child with- 
out a collection of books at his disposal at all times, 
without cost, and within a half-hour's walk of 
his dwelling." He considered reading as power- 
ful an agent in the world of mind as steam in the 
world of matter. 

"Let a child read and understand the stories 
in which great virtues are set forth, such, for ex- 
ample, as the friendship of Damon and Pythias, 
the integrity of Aristides, the fidelity of Regulus, 
the stainless purity of Washington, the invincible 



64 HORACE MANN 

perseverance of Franklin, and he will think and 
act differently for the rest of his life. Let a young 
man read a popular treatise on astronomy or geology, 
and henceforth new skies will arch above his head, 
a new earth will be spread beneath his feet." 

Mann devoted himself with his habitual energy 
to the creation of libraries. To an already enor- 
mous correspondence he added thousands of letters, 
stimulating their formation in each of the three 
or four thousand schools in Massachusetts. He 
knew well, moreover, that it was not enough to have 
books, but that they must also be well chosen. 
Mann would have liked the Board of Education 
to draw up an official list of books which it ap- 
proved. But as this proceeding of preliminary 
censure appeared illiberal and alarmed the book 
trade, Governor Morton refused to sanction it. 
Mann was therefore obliged to confine himself 
to persuasion and to indicating the books he 
preferred. He distrusted works of fiction and, 
what is more surprising, historical works. Doubt- 
less, a nation as young as America, a nation almost 
without a history, has less need than others to 
study the past; but what indisposed Mann es- 
pecially toward history was the complacency with 
which it recounts wars of conquest and sanguinary 
battles, and the robberies and rapacities of kings 



HORACE MANN 65 

and emperors, with all the moral atrocities and 
abominations of an earlier time, which in his opinion 
were to be attributed rather to the ignorance than 
to the perversity of mankind. In order that history 
might be studied with profit by children, he would 
have it rewritten and in another spirit — "What 
a series of thefts and rapines is the history of the 
past!" 

What, then, were the books recommended by 
him? They were all books useful to morals, such 
as biographies of great men, stories which tend 
to develop " courage and noble sentiments," as 
well as practical treatises on hygiene and popular 
science, "such as are suitable for active men in 
a poor country whose sterile soil needs science to 
render it fertile." Mann thought, with reason, 
that the people needed a new literature, and in order 
to embody his ideas, he negotiated with the book- 
sellers of Boston to publish two series of books in 
cheap editions, one in 18mo for children, the other 
in 12mo for adults; and in preparing them, he 
called to his assistance the most competent writers 
of his time, such as Washington Irving, the novelist, 
Edward Everett, the moralist, George B. Emerson, 
and others. What he desired was a form of litera- 
ture as simple as it was elevated, and especially 
adapted to the capacity of children. 



66 HORACE MANN 

"In most of the reading-books in use, one finds," 
he says, " moral aphorisms in which great thinkers 
have embodied their life-long experience and re- 
flection; maxims in which philosophers have 
condensed the loftiest scientific truths; and these 
are offered as early lessons to children, as if, because 
they are born after Bacon and Franklin, they are 
at once capable of understanding them." 

Mann's pedagogic work was immense, and we 
will not attempt to give an account here of all 
his reforms, of all the various measures which he 
carried out or participated in: including weekly 
lectures for teachers of both sexes; the creation 
in Boston of a model school which was to serve 
in the matter of architecture, furniture, books, 
methods, and masters as a pattern to all the others ; 
the reunion in one central school of several small 
schools located in sparsely populated districts, 
for the benefit of the older scholars only, to whom 
the distance would be no obstacle; methods of 
obligatory instruction in vocal music and drawing ; 
annual lectures to teachers to be given in each 
county during the vacations, a species of travelling 
normal school such as has always had a great 
vogue in the United States. 

For the accomplishment of his purposes Mann 
did not neglect the most trifling means. In 1840 



HORACE MANN 67 

he conceived the idea of rekindling the zeal of 
the country districts by drawing up a set of tables, 
in which the Massachusetts towns were classified 
according to the importance of the sacrifices they 
had made for the support of public education. 
This graduated table, as he called it, was, he said 
himself, his stroke of genius. The publicity he 
gave to it aroused to an extraordinary degree 
the emulation of the various towns. In a similar 
manner, he sought to stimulate the zeal of the school 
committees, whose functions had hitherto been 
entirely gratuitous, by having a small indem- 
nity assigned them, sufficient at least to defray 
their travelling expenses. Mann not only devoted 
his time and strength to the cause of education, 
he also expended for it a part of his emoluments 
as secretary, which consisted of about $1500, 
"a miserable salary/' as it is called by Ameri- 
cans to-day. His disinterestedness and generosity 
equalled his zeal; nothing was awarded for the 
purchase of books, for his correspondence, or the 
expense of his lecture tours during four months of 
the year; he furnished at his own cost geograph- 
ical maps to the schools; he likewise undertook 
his European trip at his own expense. No sacri- 
fice was too great for the furtherance of his aim; 
pecuniary considerations appealed to him very 



68 HORACE MANN 

slightly; he was astonished to find all his friends, 
with the exception of Channing, expressing curi- 
osity as to the amount of the salary he received. 
In 1849 he announced that he made no claim to 
being indemnified for the expenses he incurred 
in the discharge of his duties. "From the day 
when I accepted the office of secretary," he said, 
"I considered myself responsible for the success 
of the undertaking, and were I to expend for it 
all my means, my health, my life, — nay, a hundred 
lives if I had them, — I should hold that the 
triumph of the cause far outweighed all these 
sacrifices." 

But in spite of his protestations, a vote was 
passed allotting him an indemnity of $2000; 
George B. Emerson saying, "It has always 
seemed to me, that having made a great personal 
sacrifice in accepting the functions of secretary, 
Mann was less bound than any other citizen to 
contribute from his private purse to the success 
of the undertaking." 

But this was what he was in the habit of doing, 
and what would he not have done to bring about 
the fulfilment of his dream, — he who had said 
from the beginning that he approached his task "in 
the spirit of martyrdom." The actual reward 
for him was in the results he had brought about, 



HORACE MANN 69 

and which an American writer sums up in these 
words : 

" During these twelve years of labor, the State 
aid granted to public schools was doubled; more 
than $2,000,000 were expended in improving 
the condition of school-houses; the salaries of 
teachers were raised 62 per cent for men and 51 
per cent for women, while at the same time the 
number of women teachers was increased 54 per 
cent (3591 in 1837, 5510 in 1848); a month was 
added to the average duration of the school year; 
the proportion of private to public schools dwindled 
from 75 to 36 per cent; the supervision of the 
school committees became more general and more 
continuous ; three normal schools were established, 
which sent out several hundreds of teachers, whose 
influence was to make itself felt in every part of 
the State." 

Politics alternated with pedagogy in the varied 
career of Horace Mann. In 1848 a seat became 
vacant in the national Congress at Washington 
through the death of John Quincy Adams, former 
President of the United States, who was repre- 
sentative from Massachusetts. His succession was 
offered to Mann, who was elected by a large major- 
ity, his fellow-citizens thus showing their gratitude 
for the services he had rendered the State. 



70 HORACE MANN 

He accepted, abandoning his previous functions 
not without regret, but with the consciousness 
that as secretary of the Board of Education he 
had fulfilled his whole duty; that the impulse had 
been given; that education was advancing with 
rapid strides; and that, in short, the work being 
almost accomplished, he could henceforth be spared. 

In 1861 he was reelected — a great triumph, in 
view of the violent campaign directed against 
him by the champions of slavery and sustained 
by the great authority of Daniel Webster, then 
Secretary of State. Mann had distinguished him- 
self in the debates in Congress by his eloquence 
and zeal in behalf of all measures tending toward 
the abolition of slavery. 1 He had fought against 
its further extension, expressing himself in these 
words: " Rather than suffer it to invade other 
States, I should prefer the rupture of the Union, 
civil war, even servile war." 

The four years during which Mann sat in Congress, 
always active and always eloquent, may be counted 
among the most brilliant pages in his career; but 
they are beside our subject, and we must now 



1 In a debate which lasted twenty-one days, he defended 
three abolitionists who had carried away fifty slaves in order 
to liberate them. He ended by obtaining the acquittal of his 
clients. See Speeches on Slavery, 1852. 



HORACE MANN 71 

return to the pedagogue who, four years later, 
reverted to his chosen mission and voluntarily 
assumed the presidency of Antioch College, there 
to display the qualities of an admirable, practical 
educator. 



Ill 

Horace Mann's Philosophy 

Let us pause in the narrative of Mann's life 
and educational work — as he himself paused during 
the four years of his political life — and attempt 
to define briefly those principles and general ideas 
which constantly guided his efforts. 

A man of action .before all, a nature swayed by 

inspiration rather than reflection, Mann had not 

the leisure and lacked, moreover, the power of 

abstraction necessary for constructing a philosophy 

of his own. In his agitated and feverish life he 

found no time to condense his thoughts or to write 

learned treatises. Undoubtedly he wrote a great 

deal, as he spoke a great deal, but all his writings, 

whether reports, lectures, or speeches, — we were 

about to say sermons, — were primarily action, 

and bore the stamp of the orator. He had no 

/personal philosophy beyond an ardent faith in 

/ progress and the indefinite perfectibility of the 

V human race. The critical spirit is not that which 

generally distinguishes American thinkers. The 

72 



HORACE MANN 73 

spirit of analysis, moreover, is rarely allied with 
enthusiasm, and enthusiasm was the dominant note 
in Mann's intelligence. Let us not ask from him, 
therefore, a coordinate whole, a system of clear 
and precise views upon human nature. His psy- 
chology remained always confused and inexact. 
It sets out with a confession of impotence: "The 
nature of mind is impenetrable." Mann accepts 
the most daring theories; as, for example, that 
liberty consists of one thing only, — the choice be- 
tween good and evil. The choice made once for 
all between obedience or disobedience to the divine 
law, "the law seizes us and flings us high or low, 
raises us or lowers us with irresistible power." 
In other words, one moment — one only — of 
freedom is granted us, then we bow beneath the 
yoke of a kind of fatality. This is to simplify too 
much, and to solve somewhat lightly, the problem 
of the complex play of human will and action. 

Where Mann was not mistaken was in affirm- 
ing that there are laws, — without, however, know- 
ing precisely what they are, — laws presiding over 
the formation of minds as imperious as those which 
preside over the production of flowers and fruits. 
And Mann understood thoroughly that it was 
necessary to know these laws in order to establish 
solidly the foundations of education. He knew 



74 HORACE MANN 

that pedagogy must rest on a philosophical doctrine. 
"How can we conduct education/' he said, " with- 
out having conceived a theory of the mind?" 
Not being able to frame for himself this theory 
which he sought, he borrowed it. He found in 
his path, so to speak, the philosophy of an English 
writer, George Combe, and adopted it; he made 
it his own, somewhat as the spiritualistic philosopher 
Boyer-Collard, according to Laine, having found 
and purchased one day at a book-stall on the quays 
of the Seine, the works of the Scotchman Thomas 
Reid, founded thereon the official French philos- 
ophy of the nineteenth century. 

Who was George Combe? A man of heart 
assuredly, who merited the sympathy of his great 
friend in America. They had made each other's 
acquaintance in Boston, whither Combe had gone in 
1838 to deliver a course of lectures. Mann heard 
him and was won over at once to his views. They 
formed a close friendship which was severed only 
by death and was kept alive by an active corre- 
spondence. Combe said of Mann: "He was a de- 
lightful companion and friend; of all the men 
I met in Boston, he was the best." While Mann, 
on his side, wrote to Combe: "There is no man of 
whom I think oftener than of you, or who has 
done me so much good as you." 



HORACE MANN 75 

Combe had published in 1828 a volume entitled 
The Constitution of Man. Mann speaks of it 
with extraordinary enthusiasm and some naivete. 
He regards it as a " masterpiece of thought." 
Combe's philosophy seems to him destined to work 
in the moral sciences a revolution analogous to 
that of Bacon in the domain of physical science; 
and carrying hyperbole to its utmost limits, he 
exclaims: "Just as there could be but one dis- 
covery of the circulation of the blood, or of the 
solar system, so there could be but one author 
of The Constitution of Man." 1 

George Combe hardly merited such emphatic 
eulogiums. His doctrine was, after all, but a poor 
and mediocre philosophy, in which the author 
developed in a cold and prosaic style the narrow, 
meagre psychological system of Gall and the phre- 
nologists. It is easy, however, to account for Mann's 
genuine devotion to the ideas of the English psy- 
chologist. There was a certain intellectual affinity 
between them. Combe was not one of those con- 

1 George Combe published in 1840 another work which also 
aroused Mann's admiration: "Your Moral Philosophy is worthy 
of your Constitution of Man, without being equal to it, which 
would be impossible." Mann's sincerity is proved by the fact 
that he could speak disagreeable truths to his friend, as, for 
example, on his publishing a Journal of Education which Mann 
thought unworthy of him. 



76 HORACE MANN 

templative philosophers who confine themselves 
to the region of pure speculation; he presented his 
psychology rather as an introduction to the science 
and art of education; hence his essays in the region 
of a higher and more analytical philosophy adapt 
themselves admirably to the instructive views 
of Mann. He was also a friend to popular edu- 
cation; and his writings on pedagogy were not 
devoid of merit, since twenty years after his death 
they were still held in honor among his country- 
men. That which chiefly attracted Mann in his 
system must have been, first, his attempts to frame 
national moral laws for the government of man- 
kind, — laws to which it was only necessary to con- 
form to attain wisdom; and, secondly, his recom- 
mendation of care of the body no less than of the 
mind. In his system physical health was a con- 
dition of the soul's health, a principle of morality; 
proper food and clothing being, according to his 
view, as essential elements in the happiness of 
mankind as books and lessons. The question 
of alimentation had always been of the highest 
importance in Mann's estimation. "It is a great 
misfortune," he said, "that the quantity and quality 
of food which a people consume cannot be deter- 
mined by some fixed rule;" and elsewhere: "As 
I grow older and, I hope, wiser, I am conscious 



HORACE MANN 77 

that the contempt I formerly professed for the 
stomach and the lungs has gradually changed 
into a sort of respect for these bodily organs. 
They are not Dii majores, but Dii minores, 
without whose aid the higher faculties of the 
brain are as disabled as a sea-captain would be 
who attempted to navigate his ship without 
sailors." 

There was nothing in Combe's system, even 
to its fundamental idea of the cerebral localiza- 
tion of the various faculties of the mind, but was 
of a nature to attract Mann. 1 Freed from what 
savors of charlatanism, such as the claim that the 
bumps on the cranium are the outward mani- 
festation of mental qualities phrenology contains 
a kernel of truth which partly justifies the success 
it obtained with Mann and his friend. 2 It teaches 
that the human faculties are so many distinct 
forces which can be developed by exercise, by an 
appropriate activity. This is what Mann never 
ceased to repeat, being convinced in advance of 

1 Mann is not the only distinguished man over whom G. Combe 
exerted an influence. Mr. John Morley has shown in one of 
his books, The Life of Richard Cobden, that the illustrious econ- 
omist had also been influenced by him (1881). 

2 Phrenology was the fashion in America at this time. Nearly 
all Mann's friends, Pierce, George B. Emerson, Dr. Howe, were 
fervent adherents of it. 



78 HORACE MANN 

a doctrine which places man's destiny in his own 
hands, so to speak, and proclaims the omnipotence 
of education, since it is able to insure and regulate 
the development of all the faculties by means of 
the activity it imparts to them. 

When Mann essayed himself, following Combe, 
to define what he calls "the laws of the mind," "the 
laws of God," he indicated but two such laws, which, 
according to him, should be the guides of the human 
mind. 

The first is the law of symmetry, which demands 
that all our faculties should be developed in har- 
mony and with perfect balance, each of them 
growing stronger through the support of the others. 
Hitherto, nations, like individuals, have exaggerated 
certain qualities at the expense of others; thus 
the perfectly well-balanced man is nowhere to be 
found. 

The second law is that our faculties are strength- 
ened by exercise and perish from inaction. "How 
many forces are suffered to lie dormant which 
gradually become extinct; on the other hand, 
how many benefits and miracles might be wrought 
for mankind by prolonged exercise and continuous 
effort ! Witness Franklin, the good and great 
Franklin." Mann had early severed his connection 
with all religious bodies to become an adherent 



HORACE MANN 79 

of natural religion only. 1 He was a Puritan in 
some respects, but a Puritan without theology. 

He complained that natural religion was not 
understood in his day, nor its power appreciated. 
"It is," he affirmed, "as superior to revealed reli- 
gion as a personal experience is to a vague hearsay." 
He doubtless recognized the elevating influence 
which established religions have exercised in the 
past, " in guiding generations of mankind through 
the darkness of the world;" but he hoped for and 
desired the speedy coming of a religion founded 
upon reason, freed from outworn dogmas and 
impenetrable mysteries. "The hour has come when 
the light of natural religion shall be to that of re- 
vealed religion what the blaze of the rising sun is 
to the pale gleam of the stars." 

He was religious, then, profoundly religious; 
a vague mysticism floats over expressions like 
these: "Soul speaks to soul, words and even 
thoughts are merely accessory." Or again: "The 
spiritual essence of man contemplates directly 
the spiritual essence of the uni verse." But from 
this religious spirit all dogma, all formal Credo, is 

1 Let us add, however, that he often spoke as a Christian, in 
a spirit of worship or at least of reverence for Christ. He said 
before his death to his wife and children: "If ever you are per- 
plexed as to what you ought to do, ask yourselves what Jesus 
Christ would have done in your place." 



80 HORACE MANN 

banished. Belief in an all-powerful creator, in 
a God of goodness, and in an immortality of happi- 
ness alone survive in his religion. 

The immortality of the soul was for Mann an 
undisputed article of faith, but he looked upon 
it from the point of view of the infinite joy re- 
served for the elect. In his writings, in his dis- 
courses, he unceasingly evokes the idea of the 
future life, not only with hope, but with certainty ; 
and although he scarcely believed in school rewards, 
— any more than in punishments, — he believed 
firmly in the rewards of another life and desired 
a heaven for all. * 

"Why have not all men entered this life virtuous, 
to be transported as by a lightning flash to the 
felicity of the next?" "We must know how to 
bear suffering, to submit without comprehending 
it in expectation of the compensations of eternity. 
The divine law is eternal; it follows us in this 
world and the next, making of the two but one 
world, and reducing death simply to an incident 
of life. Our virtuous and criminal actions will 
live always in their good and evil consequences: 
how much more, then, shall the agent himself 
live!' 7 

And with the emphasis habitual to his eloquence 
he adds : 



HORACE MANN 81 

"A grain of wheat buried with the mummy 
of Sesostris may germinate anew to-day and unite 
the nineteenth century with the remotest antiquity. 
Can, then, the soul of the great king be dissolved 
into nothingness?" 

We have said that Mann's psychology is uncer- 
tain and vague. He has, nevertheless, attempted 
to sketch in broad outlines this psychology, which 
is rather a system of morality. 

It is, in fact, the moral consciousness and the 
sense of responsibility which Mann places in the 
first rank among the higher faculties of man. Im- 
mediately after these, he places — even before 
the family affections — the social and sympathetic 
faculties, benevolence toward others, philanthropy. 
In other words, man is above all a creature of duty, 
subject to moral law ; in the next place, he is a being 
devoted to others. Mann neither sought nor found 
the opportunity for becoming a martyr, but in 
another age he would have been capable of it in 
the service of humanity or to attest his social 
faith. 

"The history of the heroes of antiquity and of 
the martyrs of Christianity, although their dust 
has been scattered for centuries, arouses in us 
such transports of admiration that we long to be 
in their place; and this passion raises us to such 



82 HORACE MANN 

heights that the most terrible death for a sacred 
cause appears to us as lovely and desirable as 
the young bride to her bridegroom." 

And after exalting these high and noble aspira- 
tions of human nature, Mann brands with pitiless 
sternness the egotistic sentiments, the lower propen- 
sities, which make of man, when they rule him, "a 
ferocious beast, a bird of prey." " Neither in the 
den of the lion nor in the vulture's eyry do there 
exist brigands comparable to those men who are 
dominated by the insatiable appetites of selfishness." 

Intelligence, strictly so called, the intelligence 
which reasons, which analyzes, which decides dryly 
and coldly, is not Mann's affair. He deliberately 
subordinates the reasoning being to the being of 
sentiment; and it is precisely here that we must 
seek the secret of his strength, of the sovereign 
power which his inspired eloquence exerted over 
his contemporaries. J He was, above all, a man of 
heart, — one who surrendered himself to the in- 
stincts of a noble nature, who felt before thinking, 
and whose sentiments, brimful of the sap of spring, 
overflowed and bloomed with life, youth, and fresh- 
ness. How wide is the gulf between this sensitive 
soul, sentimental, even quick, to enthusiastic beliefs, 
faithful without reserve to the fundamental prin- 
ciples of human nature, and the " Intellectuals" 



HORACE MANN 83 

of our day, whose destructive criticism would 
shatter, if we listened to them, our faith in hu- 
manity and its eternal aspirations ! How he would 
have suffered, how startled as well as wounded his 
conscience would have been, could he have known 
to what a frenzy of negation an abuse of the analytic 
spirit was to lead some of the men who followed him ! 

We analyze to-day the idea of patriotism, and it 
melts away to give place to the chimera of inter- 
nationalism; we analyze the idea of property, and 
it is reduced to collectivism; we analyze the 
idea of God and are led to atheism; we analyze 
the idea of the family, and behold indifferent and 
ungrateful sons; we analyze the idea of duty, and 
the moral law becomes a mere word devoid of 
meaning. 

Amid these divagations of an overstimulated 
intellectualism, Mann would have appealed more 
forcibly than ever to the primal instincts of nature 
in defence of things sacred in his eyes. He would 
have reiterated that the ideal of the thinker is 
to combine with the light of pure thought that 
ardor and warmth of sentiment which are also, 
in themselves, a light. 

"If the best wines are those for which the grapes 
have ripened on the slopes of a volcano, so the 
best thoughts are those that spring from a clear 



84 HORACE MANN 

brain warmed by a large heart." Mann always 
subordinated intellectual to moral culture. In 
one of his reports he wrote: — 

"How many lessons, recitations, and examinations 
we require for the development of the mind ! What 
a multitude of books must be read and reread! 
But for the formation of character and right feeling, 
what poverty of instruction! What do we teach 
children in regard to their reciprocal duties, the 
affection which brothers and sisters owe each other ? 
What. as to filial piety, as to the obligations of men 
of wealth toward those less fortunate than them- 
selves? How do we teach them to avoid the 
passions of pride and greed, of envy and revenge? 
What as to the countless calamities resulting from 
drink and gambling? Does arithmetic teach them 
the folly of investing in lotteries? Does history 
insist strongly enough upon the criminal character 
of nine-tenths of the wars it records, and upon 
the horrible sufferings they have brought upon 
the human race? When teaching of such im- 
portance as this is neglected, children may indeed 
become good grammarians and ready reckoners, 
but will they be just, good, and benevolent men?" 

Thus Mann's pedagogy, like his psychology, con- 
sisted chiefly of morality. "He who does the 
most good to his fellow-men," he said, "is the 



HORACE MANN 85 

master of masters and has learned the art of 
arts." 

Mann's countrymen have often called him a 
radical, even a revolutionary; to us he appears, 
on the contrary, to have been a wise and prudent 
spirit, a moderate opportunist in every respect, 
except in his speech, which was overemphatic 
and at times slightly declamatory. He knew 
how to make necessary concessions and to accept 
compromises. He understood that by violently 
attacking tradition and established customs one 
runs the risk of losing everything. If, in the 
last years of his life, he joined an organized church, 
it was because he regarded this step as useful to 
his designs and necessary to the success of the 
cause of which he had constituted himself the 
champion; the Christian Union, of which he be- 
came a member, being the only door open to liberal 
ideas in the West. 

Mann had had no regular teachers before the 
age of twenty; he had been, above all, the pupil 
of nature. We might assume that an education 
of this sort, a chance education, as it were, would 
have left something disorderly in his mind; but 
it was not so. Aside from certain flights of the 
imagination, Mann's is a classic mind. His taste 
for lofty language, the large and ample construe- 



86 HORACE MANN 

tion of his speeches, reveal what we might call 
a spontaneous classic culture. He had a special 
taste for the Latin authors and quotes them as 
constantly as a humanist might do. He tells us 
that in his youth, if he chanced to meet a young 
girl who was a Latin scholar, he regarded her as 
a sort of divinity. 

Nevertheless, the utilitarian and practical ten- 
dencies, suitable to a good American, reveal them- 
selves in the spirit of this humanist. "What 
satisfactory argument can we invoke," he asks, 
"to show why algebra, a science which not one 
man in a thousand has occasion to use in the affairs 
of life, should be studied by more than 2300 scholars 
in the Massachusetts schools, whereas bookkeeping, 
which all, even workmen, require, is only taught 
to about half that number ? * For farmers and 
road-makers, why give geometry the preference 
over land-surveying ? And why, among those who 
devote themselves to the pursuit of intellectual 
truth, are the students of rhetoric twice as numerous 
as those of logic?" 

No one has expressed more forcibly the law 
of solidarity, which unites successive generations 
one to the other, and makes universal education 

1 At Antioch Mann struggled for months to obtain the ap- 
pointment of a professor of bookkeeping. 



HORACE MANN 87 

a debt which the nation must discharge by assum- 
ing the whole expense of maintaining schools. 
This idea he formulates in three propositions: — 

"1. Successive generations of mankind taken col- 
lectively constitute one great community. 

"2. All the wealth which this community pos- 
sesses it owes to all its children with a view to 
providing them with an education adequate to pro- 
tect them from poverty and vice, and prepare them 
worthily to perform their civic and social duties. 

"3. The successive holders of this wealth are 
merely its trustees, bound by the most sacred 
obligations to execute their mandate faithf ully ; and 
to divert this wealth from its true object, the 
education of the young, is as great a crime, indeed 
a greater one, than similar breach of faith with 
contemporaries." 

Convinced, as he was, of the necessity of education, 
Mann seems to have hesitated for a time in regard 
to the question of compulsory school attendance. 
He was not by nature inclined toward restraint 
or the rigor of any law whatever, but, on the con- 
trary, expected everything from the charms which 
enlightenment must have for souls plunged in 
the darkness of ignorance. 

"Let the intelligent man/ 7 he said, "visit the 
ignorant daily, as the oculist visits the blind and 



88 HORACE MANN 

removes the scales from their eyes until the living 
sense opens once more to the living light. Let the 
zealous man enter into communion with those torpid 
from indifference, and melt the ice in which they are 
entombed. Let the love of childhood, the love 
of country, the dictates of reason, the sentiment 
of religious responsibility, unite in a wise blending 
of tenderness and severity, until the grim, hard 
mass of ignorance, avarice, and prejudice gives 
way before the combined action of their heat 
and light." 

Let us wait, in other words, until the people 
desire education before offering it to them. But 
is it not a mistake to let oneself be misled by the 
illusions of a chimerical optimism? Does not 
history prove that in order that a people shall 
seek instruction, they must be forced to it ? Mann, 
in fact, speedily renounced his error ; by the year 
1847 he had completely changed his opinion, and 
warned by experience of the indifference and 
carelessness of parents, he recognized the need for 
enforcing school attendance. 

Mann was not merely a powerful orator whose 
heart animated his voice and kindled his accents, 
and whose broad mind overflowed with ideas: 
he was also a skilled and persuasive writer. It 
has been said of his style that it was as brilliant 



HORACE MANN 89 

and flowery as spring in a New England meadow. 
It was even too much so, perhaps. His ardent 
imagination not only inspired him with prophetic 
visions, great conceptions of the future: it also 
enriched his thought and style with an excessive 
wealth of imagery. 

He himself acknowledged — and it was a defect 
in his own eyes — "the profusion and redundance 
of his metaphors." And he added gracefully: 
"This fault would perhaps be forgiven me if one 
knew what trouble I daily take to refuse to my 
tongue and pen the flood of metaphors which 
invade my imagination." We can the more easily 
forgive him this poetic exuberance in consideration 
of its having greatly contributed to the success 
of his undertakings. He neither wrote nor spoke 
for the learned and literary; he addressed popular 
audiences ; and he was forced, in order to be under- 
stood, to multiply his arguments and develop 
his ideas somewhat diffusely. He was obliged, 
in order that he might dominate the minds of his 
readers and hearers, to be prodigal of metaphors 
and figures of speech. How many brilliant pages 
we could quote, were it not that their force would 
be weakened, their brilliancy dimmed, by the 
attempt to condense them! None of the great 
ideas which constitute the modern spirits were 



90 HORACE MANN 

unknown to Mann, and he expressed them with 
equal vigor and poetic feeling. Of science, he says 
that it invests us with a sort of creative power, 
and that " man's dominion over the earth spreads 
in proportion to his knowledge." Of the beauty 
of nature, he says that she opened up to us a world of 
marvels: " Dazzling flowers on the great lap of 
earth, colored star rays in the infinite azure of 
the skies, brilliant tints of the young foliage, still 
more brilliant hues of the dying foliage in autumn." 
And above the true and the beautiful, above the world 
of true thoughts and beautiful things, he shows us 
what he calls the sublimity of the moral world. 

"The laws of physical nature are sublime, 
but there exists a moral sublimity, before which 
the highest intelligence bows down and adores. 
The laws which cause the winds to blow, the 
tides to rise and fall, planets to roll, and suns to 
shine, the laws which preside over the subtle 
combinations of atoms and the terrible speed of 
electricity, the laws of germination and reproduc- 
tion in the vegetable and animal kingdom, what- 
ever be their radiant beauty, pale and fade before 
the moral glories which envelop the universe in 
celestial light. The heart is aware of charms 
which no beauty of things known, no dream of 
things unknown, can equal. Virtue shines with 



HORACE MANN 91 

a purer ray than the diamond, the gardens of 
Arabia do not breathe so sweet a perfume as that 
of charity. ..." 

What a beautiful picture he draws of the honest 
man and good citizen! The purity of morals, 
the punctuality, probity, devotion to others, the 
spirit of self-sacrifice, of solidarity, — all these virtues 
he draws with a glowing pen. "The honest man, 
the good citizen, is doubtless not insensible to the 
charm of the arts, but he knows that the most 
beautiful of arts is to paint smiles and joy upon 
the pale cheeks of poor and suffering childhood.' ' 
Reason and conscience have taught him "that 
it is not permissible to adorn rich galleries with 
the marvels of art while the orphan is neglected 
in the streets, while the sons of the intemperate 
and profligate have no school but that of obscenity 
and blasphemy, while the world is afflicted with 
infinite evils which superfluous wealth and wasted 
time would amply suffice to remedy." 

Mann was a republican by conviction ; he hailed 
with joy the rise of democracy without disguising 
from himself its dangers. 

"I rejoice that power has passed irrevocably 
into the hands of the people. For ages upon 
ages humanity has groaned beneath oppression; 
whole races have been enslaved for the benefit 



92 HORACE MANN 

of a chosen few. To gratify the ambition of 
tyrants, nations have perished on the battle- 
field. The noblest faculties of man have been ob- 
scured and crushed by ignorance and superstition. 
There has been an end to liberty of conscience, 
of thought, and of speech. Heaven itself has been 
offered for sale, like a piece of property, by men 
who had no right to it. . . . Power has now passed 
from the few to the many, from the oppressors 
to their victims. The rich, the noble, the privi- 
leged classes, had been granted authority for the 
benefit of the people and had misused it. Their 
fate is to-day in the hands of the people : its poverty 
commands their opulence; its ignorance decides 
their rights; its appetites threaten their homes. 
It is no longer a question of philanthropy with 
them; they have nothing to consider now but 
how to protect and save themselves. They will 
understand at last that the favored classes are 
safe only through the devotion or self-interest 
of the rest. . . ." 

An optimist, like all good men who naturally 
incline to believe in the goodness of others and 
who, being sure of the nobility of their intentions, 
never dream of being misunderstood; and unable, 
like all active men, to imagine that their efforts 
will be in vain, Mann conceived high hopes for 



HORACE MANN 93 

the future of humanity; but he was at the same 
time clear-sighted enough to perceive to what 
dangers the sovereign power of universal suffrage 
exposes a free democracy, if it is not enlightened by 
instruction and education; and of these fatal 
consequences of liberty in ignorance, he traced 
the darkest picture : — 

" Already sounds on our ears the tread of that 
innumerable army of the coming generations. 
They are men who will take counsel only of their 
desires, which they will transform into laws; so- 
ciety will no longer be anything but the incarnation 
of their will, and if we take no more care than we 
have hitherto done to enlighten and regulate that 
will, it will engrave its laws upon the whole circuit 
of the globe in gigantic and awful characters. " 

Certainly he did not doubt the future of the 
republic nor its perpetuity. 

"It would be easier to turn back the sun in his 
course than to monopolize again in the hands 
of a few the power which has passed into the hands 
of the people. Sooner will the oak reenter the 
acorn than we shall return to the monarchical 
and aristocratic forms of the past." 

And elsewhere: 

"Ideas of liberty, duty, and fraternity now 
move the nations, and neither the Pope with his 



94 HORACE MANN 

Cardinals nor the Czar with his Cossacks will suc- 
ceed in suppressing them." 

But to this triumphant democracy he gave 
the wisest counsels, and at all times and in all 
countries it is useful to hear and ponder his eloquent 
warnings; such, for example, as these: "It is 
perhaps easy to found a republic; it certainly 
is not easy to make republicans. Woe to the 
republic which is founded only upon the suffrage 
of ignorance, egotism, and passion ! National rep- 
resentation is the faithful mirror of the mind 
and ideals of the people, and if these ideals are 
not on a level with its institutions, what perils 
and disasters are possible!" 

Thus he reasoned more and more strongly for 
the necessity of universal education. "He is not 
an American statesman/' he said, "who does not 
devote all his efforts to the education of the people." 
And this is equally true of every country on earth. 

"Education is our only political safeguard; 
outside of this ark there is no salvation." If 
education did not succeed in preserving the public 
mind from corruption, all would be lost; all at- 
tempts to protect by law the property, the liberty, 
even the life of the citizen would be as vain as 
"the attempt to drive hornets from our orchards 
by means of sign-posts and warnings." 



IV 

Horace Mann, President op Antioch College 
(1853-1859) 

The interest never languishes in the life of Hor- 
ace Mann; scarcely has he accomplished one 
task before he undertakes another. Men of action, 
such as he, never cease their activity in widely 
different directions ; they labor till the last breath 
and die at their task. 

The 15th of September, 1852, Horace Mann, 
member of Congress, was elected governor of Mas- 
sachusetts by the free suffrage of his fellow-citizens. 
On the same day a society of friends of education 
offered him the presidency of a new college about 
to be established at Yellow Springs, Ohio. Called 
upon to choose between these two positions, Mann did 
not hesitate ; he decided in favor of the more modest 
office, but the greater in his eyes, the academic one. 
This time he sacrificed politics to education. 

He held the presidency of Antioch College for 
six years, until his death. It was a laborious 
and painful period of his life and in some respects 

95 



96 HORACE MANN 

a dramatic one. While this position offered a 
great field for his executive powers and revealed 
his rare gifts as a practical educator, it obliged 
him to contend with difficulties of every descrip- 
tion ;f he suffered much as Pestalozzi had suffered 
at Yverdon, so that these last years of his life 
present at times a painful and pathetic spectacle. 

The work to be undertaken was an interesting 
one and of a nature to tempt Mann's ambition. 
To his ardent imagination it appeared as an op- 
portunity to regenerate the Western States, which 
were still partly wilderness and at least backward 
in order and civilization. It seemed to him that 
he had but to open in this new region a college 
for advanced study and lofty ethics, in order to 
import thither all the civilization which had long 
flourished in the more favored soil of the Easj/ 
"Shall the West," he asked, "that empire as 
vast almost as that of the Caesars, belong to science, 
virtue, and human brotherhood, or shall it become 
the prey of corruption and license ? . . . It can only 
be civilized if a son of Massachusetts transplants 
there the spirit of the original States of the Union, 
— those States which have long reverenced reli- 
gion and learning." 

The spirit which was to preside, according to 
the plan of its founders, over this new institution 



HORACE MANN 97 

was in perfect harmony with Mann's general views. 
At a preparatory gathering, the first Faculty 
Meeting held at his house in West Newton, in 
October, 1852, where the programme of studies was 
drawn up, he discovered, with delight, that they 
were in complete agreement. "We are all teeto- 
talers," he wrote, "all anti-tobacco men, all anti- 
slavery men, and the majority are adepts in phre- 
nology; all hostile to emulation, that is, opposed 
to any system of discipline founded on rewards 
and prizes, and which, by exciting children to com- 
pare themselves with their companions, leads them 
away from the true motive of action, which is to 
compare oneself with an ideal of excellence." 

The agreement was equally close in religious 
matters; the promoters of the enterprise, though 
professing themselves free from all sectarian spirit, 
yet belonged, most of them, to a new association 
calling itself the Christian Union; they claimed 
to have no other creed than the Bible and to have 
cast aside all denominational bonds. They wished 
to be simply Christians after the manner of the 
first Christians in the city of Antioch, and it was 
for this reason that the college was named Antioch 
College. In 1853 Mann was already fifty-seven 
years of age; he had never, up to this time, been 
a practical instructor, or even done any regular 



98 HORACE MANN 

teaching. It was thus a fortunate new departure 
for him to be able to devote the -evening of his 
-beautiful life to the application of his favorite 
ideas. Certainly it was not without regret that 
he left New England, the scene of his long scholastic 
propaganda and of his political career;:, and when 
he bade a last farewell to the friends who came to 
see him off, the strong man wept like a child. 
Moreover, he was not unaware, though he did not 
foresee them all, of the difficulties awaiting him 
in a comparatively rude region, so far behind 
that which he was leaving in traditions, morals, 
and social culture. These difficulties other edu- 
cators had encountered before him, and he had 
been fully warnecLj 

Twenty years earlier Catherine Beecher and 
her sister Harriet, the same who later, as Mrs. 
Harriet Beecher Stowe, became famous as the 
writer of Uncle Tom's Cabin, had met with hostility 
and opposition in undertaking to found a girls' 
college at Cincinnati. Three years before the 
foundation of Antioch, in 1850, Calvin Stowe, the 
husband of Harriet, a professor in Cincinnati, had 
been persecuted and driven out of the city by the 
partisans of slavery and forced to seek refuge in 
the East with his wife and family. Mann mentions 
in one of his letters that Catherine Beecher, as 



HORACE MANN 99 

the result of her own experience, endeavored to 
dissuade him from his project by representing to 
him the obstacles he must encounter in the in- 
hospitable region of the West. But it was all in 
vain, his mind was made up; his enthusiasm 
overflowed; and he exclaimed not without a touch 
of declamation : — 

" Where the capital of the United States ought 
to be situated is here in the Mississippi Valley, 
winch is to be the seat of its empire. No other 
valley, not the Danube, the Ganges, the Nile, nor 
the Amazon, is destined to exert so potent an in- 
fluence over the future of humanity; and this 
is the reason why, if its people study the laws of 
God on social questions and strive to conform 
to them, they should rise to the contemplation of 
the future and enduring reign of beneficence and 
peace." 

\. Antioch College opened its doors on the 5th 
of October, 1853, with nearly two hundred 
students. Over three thousand people assembled 
for the inaugural exercises. Mann pronounced 
a glowing oration, in which he gave utterance to 
his hope of conquering the West by education. 
"There is life enough in your Inaugural," wrote 
his friend, Theodore Parker, "to make a college 
flourish in the desert of Sahara." "To form young 



100 HORACE MANN 

minds and hearts," he himself said, — " was not this 
the most beautiful task ever confided to a man 
or an angel?"; 

The reality failed to correspond with these 
bright visions. First came the annoyances at- 
tendant on moving into unfinished buildings. An- 
tioch College, when Mann arrived there with his 
family, presented a forlorn spectacle: nothing 
was completed, all was still chaos or at most " ar- 
rested creation, on the third day." It required 
many months before the toil of building and moving 
was concluded. Unquestionably, the site was well 
chosen, — in the midst of a smiling landscape sur- 
rounded by verdure and tranquillity. The small 
town of Yellow Springs was famed, as its name 
indicates, for its springs of medicinal water; Mann 
was about to create fresh springs of moral life 
there. 

To make room for the college buildings, they 
had been obliged to clear a forest. Huge stumps 
of trees were lying about in all directions upon 
the miry soil, which resembled a swamp. 

Doubtless, private enterprises are admirable in 
their way, and we know that their tradition is 
happily preserved in the United States. But 
it must be acknowledged that such enterprises 
are not always carried out with the same precision 



HORACE MANN 101 

and thoroughness as the State institutions of more 
centralized countries. Antioch had been supposed 
to have an endowment of $600,000,000, but the 
actual amount was not forthcoming, and the estab- 
lishment opened with a deficit. 

For several months extreme disorder reigned 
there; the hastily erected buildings were not 
enclosed by any wall or even fence, and the animals 
of the neighborhood entered the college precincts 
with the utmost freedom, — the famous Ohio pigs 
circulating through the corridors and often ob- 
structing the way for masters and pupils. As 
there was no drinking water on the place, the 
young girls belonging to the college were obliged 
to fill their pitchers at a well a quarter of a mile 
distant, and this in the depth of winter and often 
in the snow. There were no fires to warm the 
buildings, and several cold months passed before 
the arrival of the furnaces which had been ordered. 
The interior furnishing was deficient not only in 
the comforts, but in the necessities of life : the 
library was devoid of books, there was a total 
absence of writing tables, so that the students 
were obliged to eat and study by turns at the same 
tables. 

Some one has said: "Give us men, and it will 
matter little if we set up a university or a college 



102 HORACE MANN 

in barracks, or the students live in tents !" Horace 
Mann was assuredly a man, but even his strong 
will could not supply the material deficiencies 
from which his colleagues and pupils were suffer- 
ing. The students, ill-clothed and ill-fed, began 
to be insubordinate, and during the first year Mann 
feared that a mutiny might break out in the dining 
room, and by way of precaution he took his meals 
at the common table. The masters were not 
regularly paid, and it was found necessary to re- 
duce the salaries and employ less expensive teachers. 
For a year and a half Mann did not touch his salary, 
but with a devotion to his task worthy of a Pesta- 
lozzi, he exclaimed: "I am ready to suffer any- 
thing for these young people!" 

These difficulties were not confined to the first 
days; the situation grew worse and worse, and 
Mann experienced hours of profound discourage- 
ment. Not only did he behold the institution 
on the verge of financial ruin, but he was conscious 
of an ill-concealed opposition among those about 
him. The patrons of the enterprise, members 
of the Christian Union, claimed to belong to no 
sect, but at heart they inclined toward orthodoxy, 
and Mann's liberalism caused them some anxiety. 
When he decided to enter the pulpit and constitute 
himself a minister, there arose a fresh series of 



HORACE MANN 103 

attacks against this improvised " clergyman." On 
the one hand, he was charged with having renounced 
his liberal convictions; on the other, with not 
having conformed to the laws of evangelical ordi- 
nation. 

Mann, as president of the college, was concerned 
merely with the moral direction of the house; 
he had no administrative duties and had not even 
the right to select his own professors. A super- 
intendent had been appointed as his colleague, 
charged with the administration, who soon gave 
evidence, in his relations with Mann, of an unaccom- 
modating temper, and who, instead of supporting 
his authority, constantly sought to undermine it 
f-a second Schmid for this new Pestalozzi.- 
Antioch also sustained attacks from those who 
had been on its staff, a pamphlet of over three 
hundred pages, criticising Mann and the college, 
having been circulated by a former professor who 
had been dismissed. 

Finally, Mann was growing old; his strength 
was failing day by day. In 1855 he was attacked 
by a partial paralysis of the tongue and was con- 
fined for weeks to a bed of suffering. But his 
iron will was stronger than disease, stronger than 
the hostility of his enemies. "Here I am, and 
here I stay," he wrote; "I try to think the sun- 



104 HORACE MANN 

rises and sunsets as beautiful as those I gazed 
upon in Boston in the society of my friends." 
Nothing could turn him aside from his great mission 
as an educator, which comprised two things, in- 
separable in his eyes, — to honor God and serve hu- 
manity. "We must succeed or die," he wrote. 
He succeeded, indeed, in a great measure, and he 
died at his task ! i 

Mann's first concern had been to organize the 
course of study, and this could not be regularly 
accomplished for some time. The students who 
poured into Antioch College at its opening were 
not ordinary students nor easily classified; they 
were of all ages and all conditions, — adolescents, 
adults, and even married men. Attracted by Mann's 
great reputation, a number of ministers had 
abandoned their parishes in order to follow a college 
course. But all, or nearly all, were of such ex- 
ceptional ignorance that the professors were driven 
to their wits' ends. Out of the total number of 
pupils admitted in 1853 — about two hundred — 
seven only were found capable of constituting 
a small freshman class; that is to say, of entering 
on a first year of secondary studies. 

All this, it is true, changed rapidly; and to the 
disorderly rabble of the first days there succeeded 
in the following years a carefully culled elite. The 



HORACE MANN 105 

college was no longer open to the first comer; 
applications had grown so numerous that Mann 
was able to discriminate; he accordingly estab- 
lished entrance examinations with rigid conditions 
of admission. And herein is clearly shown the 
character of an educator who valued moral qualities 
above intellectual gifts: out of all the young men 
who presented themselves, Mann made a selection 
based on moral rather than intellectual quali- 
fications; the highest knowledge in his opinion 
being reserved as the privilege of virtuous youth. 
He reversed the terms of the Socratic adage, 
"He who is wise is good," and said, "Only he 
who is good shall be called to become wise." This 
was to overlook the necessity for educating all; 
it was also to simplify the problem of moral edu- 
cation by well-nigh suppressing it altogether. In 
order to secure beforehand the moral integrity 
of his college, Mann sought to admit to it only 
worthy young men. He closed its doors to all 
whose characters did not seem to him to offer 
a sufficient guarantee for the future. He put 
them on their trial, so to speak, during the pre- 
paratory course of three years, to which he ad- 
mitted all applicants on condition of eliminating, 
as soon as it became necessary, the incorrigibly 
vicious. And he admitted to the benefits of the 



106 HORACE MANN 

higher education what he called "the privileges and 
delights of science and letters' ' — only those youths 
whose morals and character he had proved. 

Under these conditions, with a carefully selected 
body of students under such a leader as Mann, 
Antioch could not fail to become a model college. 
The system of instruction was founded, on the 
whole, upon the pattern of the older New England 
colleges; Latin and Greek were taught, and the 
degree of B.A. was conferred upon graduates. 
Mann, however, introduced some interesting in- 
novations into his course of studies. He gave 
a larger place to the sciences and history, in spite 
of his prejudice against the latter study, and in- 
scribed physiology and hygiene on a college course 
for the first time. Always concerned with the 
problem of training efficient teachers, he founded 
courses on the theory and practice of teaching, 
thus making of Antioch a sort of normal school. 

But it was in his methods, above all, that Mann 
introduced innovations: first, by establishing the 
system of optional courses, those "electives" which 
still enjoy such favor in the United States and 
which the reforms of 1902 have partially intro- 
duced into French secondary education. He made 
it obligatory to follow all the courses in the senior 
class only, where particular attention was paid 



HORACE MANN 107 

to historical and philosophical studies. Another 
novelty was the preference given to oral instruction 
over teaching by books. "The fewest text-books 
possible " was Mann's motto. The cultivation of 
speech was one of his hobbies, and he wished that 
even children should have daily practice in de- 
scribing the objects about them and in relating 
a story orally. 

It is evident that Mann had reflected seriously 
upon questions of practical pedagogy. In his 
inaugural address on assuming the presidency 
of Antioch, he discussed several of these essential 
problems ; as, for instance : Is it from the humani- 
ties and the dead languages or from mathematics 
and the natural sciences that we should seek the 
true discipline of the mind? How can science 
be reconciled with literature in a plan of studies 
and how is specialization to be combined with 
general culture? How can the professor who 
is himself a seeker for truth develop the love of 
research in his pupils? 

Mann was not content merely to direct and inspire 
the teaching of his colleagues : he himself taught the 
branches of moral philosophy and political economy, 
thus reserving as his part the training of the honest 
man and good citizen. He occupied, moreover, 
the chair of natural theology; and in these various 



108 HORACE MANN 

directions he was, according to the testimony of 
his pupils, an accomplished teacher. His teaching 
was " stimulating and suggestive," we are told, 
and there was something in it of feminine delicacy 
and gentleness. 

But it was especially in the house discipline, 
of which all the responsibility rested on him, that 
Mann showed his originality. It was a discipline 
of freedom, by which the students were taught 
to guide themselves; supervision was dispensed 
with, even in the dormitories. The college was 
transformed into a home, and became, as it were, 
one great family, of which Mann was the kind 
and attentive father living in the midst of his 
children. The pupils were associated in the dis- 
cipline of the house by a sort of mutual self-govern- 
ment. The oldest pupils took the younger ones 
under their special protection, just as in a family 
the big brothers look after the little ones, under 
the eye of the parents. At the convention of 
Ohio colleges in 1856 Mann offered the following 
resolution: "That the pupils in an institution 
of learning shall cooperate in its government and 
contribute toward maintaining order." This was 
very much what was being attempted at the same 
period at Rugby by the great English head-master, 
Thomas Arnold. At Antioch the students, on 



HORACE MANN 109 

entering, pledged themselves on their honor to 
obey the rules of the college, and they kept their 
word. By appealing to their conscience, to their 
free will, Mann sought not only to fit them to be 
men, but to put an end to that state of warfare, 
that antagonism between teachers and pupils, which 
is so often the curse of education. 

To avoid punishment as far as possible was the 
general aim of Mann's discipline ; and he had ex- 
plained himself fully upon this subject in his lecture 
of the year 1840. Punishment was an evil in his 
eyes : first, because under the pretext of preventing 
a greater evil it inflicts suffering ; secondly, because 
it develops the sentiment of fear and thus debases 
mind and heart. Mann did not wish to make 
himself feared, but loved; and to obtain good 
work and order, he counted upon the affection 
which a kind and competent master inspires in 
his pupils, as well as upon the charms of learning 
and the interest aroused by well-taught lessons. 

Without knowing Herbart he agreed with him 
when he says: "One hour a day spent by the 
professor in preparing an attractive lesson will 
dispense with many severities on his part." And 
elsewhere : "For a teacher to succeed he must have 
won the affection of his pupils. The child will 
learn nothing, not even mathematics, from a teacher 



110 HORACE MANN 

he does not like." To express the depressing 
effects which a system of terror has on the mind, 
he says: "You cannot fail to have seen the trunk 
of an old tree bearing the scars of a wound it has 
received in its youth: all the wounded side has 
remained twisted and gnarled, whereas on the 
other side the tree, nourished by a superabundant 
sap, has attained a disproportionate size. This 
is the exact image of a man whose youth has been 
distorted by an excess of severity."! 

In cases where it is absolut'ery necessary to 
have recourse to punishment, — and Mann was 
fully aware that one must at times resign oneself 
to this course, — one should never forget that 
penal discipline should be merely repressive, 
that its aim is, above all, to amend the culprit and 
lead him back to the path of duty. Moreover, 
great care should be taken to proportion the penalty 
to the evil intention, the "will for evil" which the 
fault betrays; and, finally, one should resort to 
punishment only with regret and sorrow: "No 
punishment is beneficent except on condition of 
its being more painful to him who inflicts than 
to him who undergoes it." 

For repressive discipline Mann therefore sub- 
stituted a regime of trust and mildness. But 
such a regime supposes, on the part of him who 



HORACE MANN 111 

applies it, strong moral authority joined to active 
vigilance. Every morning before prayers Mann 
delivered an address to the assembled pupils, — 
a sort of lay sermon, — which, however, did not 
dispense him from frequent private conversations 
with individual pupils and intimate, confidential 
talks. 

His authority was reenforced by the sympathy 
he inspired, by his great powers of persuasion, and 
by the influence of his own conscientiousness. 
The noble ideal he set before his pupils was ex- 
emplified in his own laborious and stainless life. 
A pious American writer said of him: "He offered 
the radiant and rare example of a man in whom 
a religion of mere morality produces, or at least 
is united to, an ardor of feeling, an intensity of 
virtue, which are usually associated with faith 
and positive attachment to revealed religion." 

"Where he was incomparable, " writes one of 
his old pupils, "was in the art of arousing ardor 
and enthusiasm. It would be as impossible to 
be near the sun without feeling its warmth as to 
be a witness of Mann's passion for truth without 
sharing it. The vivacity of his impressions was 
merely one form of his faith in God and man, a 
faith so contagious that [indifference, misanthropy, 
and scepticism vanished at his approach; and 



112 HORACE MANN 

when he had communicated to us this ardor and 
this faith, he was so careful to respect our individ- 
uality that he put us on our guard against the 
ascendency which his own opinions might have 
gained over us. Thus we had in him as delicate 
a guide as he was a powerful inspirer. . . . 

"We sometimes see free-thinkers who show them- 
selves as intolerant toward any difference of opinion 
in their followers as are the bigots from whom 
they have parted company. But not so Mann; 
he was too conscious of this tendency in human 
nature to wish to indoctrinate others. He praised 
every effort in the direction of free thought; he 
distrusted no one who was seeking after truth in 
purity of heart and honesty of mind." 

Does it not seem as if we were listening to an 
old pupil of Fontenay paying homage to Felix 
Pecaut and extolling at the same time the force 
of his moral ascendency and the delicate reserve 
and discretion of his liberal teaching? Does this 
imply that there is nothing to criticise in Mann's 
disciplinary methods? How can we approve of 
the role he assigned to his pupils when he urged 
them to report each other's misdoings? Just 
as in the social world a good citizen sets himself 
in opposition to the misdeeds he sees committed, 
so, according to Mann, in the smaller world of 



HORACE MANN 113 

college a good student should prevent the evil he 
is aware of by reporting it. Was not this en- 
couraging, to a certain extent, a habit of spying? 

It is permissible, also, to hold that Mann obeyed 
the dictates of an extreme asceticism in the cam- 
paign which he conducted at Antioch, as elsewhere, 
against all infractions, even the most innocent 
ones, against the law of total abstinence. He 
had inherited a strain of Puritanism from his fore- 
fathers, and one can hardly refrain from smiling 
at the anathemas he launches with the utmost 
solemnity against tobacco and smokers; as, for 
example, when he says to the Antioch students: 
"It is not mere smoke, young men, which you see 
floating off in cloudy spirals, it is a part of your 
souls; when your nerves become impregnated with 
tobacco, they can no longer execute your will." 

In his somewhat prejudiced campaign against 
tobacco, he found no less than ten reasons for 
proscribing its use; to wit, that tobacco is in- 
jurious to the health; that it poisons the air and 
annoys non-smokers; that it is a dirty and also 
a costly habit ; that for the amount a smoker spends 
for his tobacco he could buy a farm, build a house, 
or, at the very least, collect a library, etc. The 
drinking habit has never had in the United States 
a more implacable adversary than Mann. During 



114 HORACE MANN 

the convention of the Ohio Teachers' Association, 
he caused the following resolution to be adopted 
on December 27, 1836: 

" School examiners shall never grant a certificate 
of fitness as an instructor to any one indulging 
in the habitual use of spirituous liquors; and 
where the qualifications are equal between candi- 
dates, the preference shall be systematically given 
to the candidate who is a total abstainer.' ' 

But on how many points Mann gave evidence 
of the broadest spirit, notably in regard to the edu- 
cation of woman. "The coeducation of the sexes," 
he said, "is our great experiment at Antioch." 
He had already attempted it — and with success 
— in two of his primary normal schools in Massa- 
chusetts. He now sought to introduce in a college 
or institution of secondary education a reform 
which he regarded as an excellent one, and which 
his countrymen have since widely adopted. In 
fact, at the present day coeducation is the rule 
rather than the exception in schools of every order 
in the United States. And in the higher, or uni- 
versity, education also, Mann advocated the min- 
gling of both sexes, as he set forth in a statement 
addressed to the University of Michigan, the first 
university to adopt the principle of coeducation. 
Already in Ohio, at Oberhn College, women were 



HORACE MANN 115 

admitted as students, but not without restrictions: 
they were not allowed to participate in the com- 
plete scholastic course, but merely permitted to 
follow a two years' term of study. At Antioch, 
Mann went farther, — he opened wide the college 
gates to girls. He held an exalted view of woman 
and resented the old-time prejudices which denied 
her the higher education on the pretext that she had 
no need for it, or was incapable of profiting by it, 
and that she was devoid of natural aptitude for 
the sciences. How frequently he spoke in praise 
of the feminine qualities in terms which prove 
the delicacy of his own sentiments, while honor- 
ing the noble-hearted women whom he had known, 
and who served him as models when he drew this 
portrait : 

" Woman walks henceforth by the side of man, 
associated with him in his work of regeneration; 
she is always gentle, gracious, and filled with lofty 
ideas of duty. Unequalled in all deeds of kind- 
ness and charity, she binds up man's wounds 
with a hand unhardened by wielding deadly weapons, 
while her heart glows with the divine desire to 
make peace and purity reign upon earth." 

When Mann wrote these beautiful words, he 
was doubtless inspired by the example of her 
who was the companion of his later years, and 



116 HORACE MANN 

who, after his death, showed a pious and touching 
devotion to his memory. 

Thus Mann invited women to seat themselves 
on the same collegiate benches and to live beneath 
the same roof with young men at Antioch, and 
he found no cause to regret the step. At the 
convention of Ohio colleges in 1855, he recorded 
the results of his experiment in the following words : 
"Each sex has exercised a salutary influence over 
the other; they have stimulated each other intel- 
lectually and sustained each other morally." 

These are the reasons still given by the partisans 
of coeducation, not only in America, but in England, 
where a movement in favor of mixed colleges has 
prevailed for several years. In presence of girls, 
the youths, who have become their comrades in 
study, are roused to emulation ; they wish by their 
success to maintain the honor of their sex, in which 
laudable design they are not always successful; 
for, according to American opinion, it is the girls 
who are most frequently at the head of the classes. 
But at least the young men are spurred on to 
greater efforts, while their manners are softened 
and their language and bearing are freed from 
coarseness. The girls, on the other hand, lay aside 
their natural timidity and all that is essentially 
effeminate in their character ; they gain in strength 



HORACE MANN 117 

as much as do their comrades of the sterner sex 
in gentleness and courtesy. 

Mann was aware, however, that coeducation, 
while presenting many advantages, entails also 
certain dangers. To prevent these, he took all 
manner of precautions, knowing that the success 
of such a regime depends greatly upon the vigilance 
of the presiding head. He gave, accordingly, to 
the young men and women of Antioch opportunities 
for meeting frequently in evening gatherings and 
friendly reunions in presence of their teachers, 
seeking in this way to encourage general social 
intercourse among them and counteract the ten- 
dency to seek tete-a-tetes and private interviews. 
That the attainment of final diplomas was not 
always the soul object of the students, both youths 
and maidens, of Antioch, and that more than one 
matrimonial engagement enlivened the monotony 
of these studies in common, it would be vain to 
deny. But Mann would have retorted, like the 
Americans of our own day, What harm in that? 
From this comradeship in studies may result the 
best assorted unions between young people, who 
have learned to know each other, to study each 
other's characters, and to draw from their mutual 
sympathy as schoolmates the elements of future 
conjugal affection. 



118 HORACE MANN 

Let us add that Mann, while offering to young 
men and young girls the privileges of equal edu- 
cation, did not desire that it should be identical. 
He did not admit the idea that education in common 
should case the two sexes in the same mould; he 
considered that woman should be brought up as 
woman, that she should not "wear a mustache 
nor sing bass." 

The experiments tried by Mann at Antioch in 
coeducation, as in all else, appear to have been 
attended with complete success. Antioch was re- 
garded as the first of Western colleges, with which 
no other would bear comparison. Mann, had he 
lived long enough, would have joyfully continued 
his experiments in liberal education, and thus 
have contributed to the general progress of 
humanity. 

rWith the advance of age his devotion to men 
only waxed greater in a heart which always re- 
mained young. In 1856 he wrote to George 
Combe : 

"I am sixty years old; I am too deeply inter- 
ested in the great affair of human progress to wish 
to die. Those great vital questions of pauperism, 
peace, and slavery, of temperance and education, 
I cannot leave behind without a painful rending 
of the very fibres of my heart. You will doubt- 



HORACE MANN 119 

less tell me that these things will go on of them- 
selves. But I should like to see them go on with 
my own eyes, while I am alive. I am impatient 
to watch their advance. I feel for these noble 
causes what a father feels for the children he loves, 
when he dreads leaving them before they are secure 
from all moral dangers." 

It was not to be granted to Mann to cooperate 
longer in the progress of the great movements 
to which he had devoted his life. His end was 
approaching ; and to the very last day, he labored 
and struggled with the difficulties of a financial 
situation which was going from bad to worse. 

In 1858 failure was imminent; the ruin of the 
college appeared certain. Mann succeeded, how- 
ever, in averting it by mortgaging the house he 
owned in West Newton, and by appealing for aid 
to various generous friends. A new corporation 
was formed, and the college was saved. But it 
was too late. Mann's days were numbered; he 
died on the 2d of August, 1859. 1 

His physical strength, which he had greatly 
overtaxed, had long been failing. On the 28th 

1 Mann's successor as president of Antioch was Dr. Thomas 
Hill. The college was suspended during the Civil War, from 
1861-1865, but was opened immediately on its conclusion, and 
has remained to this day a flourishing institution under the 
direction of Unitarians. 



120 HORACE MANN 

of April, 1859, being invited to the first convention 
of the normal schools of America, he replied: 

" Public schools were my first love; they will 
be my last. But I must seek to recover my health ; 
I am worn out, abolished, by hard labor. I am 
a white slave who cannot look, alas ! for any aboli- 
tion of his slavery." He realized that his days 
were numbered. In his last address, delivered 
after the examinations of 1859 — what the Ameri- 
cans call the Baccalaureate sermon — and which 
was his swan-song, he said : 

" Girls and young men, after so many years 
passed together on our journey of life, the moment 
of separation has come. In a day, in an hour, 
we shall part. Would that I might continue to 
walk beside you, to sustain you with look and 
voice in the struggle against ignorance and selfish- 
ness on which you are about to enter ! Up, then, 
and onward, my young friends! When, after 
my experience of life, I am asked what I would 
do if I were allowed to issue it again in a revised 
edition, I answer that I should wish to do more 
and better in works of humanity, temperance, peace, 
education, — especially the education of women. 
I should like to live again, to enroll myself anew in 
a fifty years' campaign, and fight once more for the 
glory of God and the happiness of humanity !" 



HORACE MANN 121 

Mann's death was a touching one: the death 
of a Socrates, with the added presence of a be- 
loved wife and cherished sons. The physicians 
warned him that he had but three hours more 
to live, as the jailer of Athens announced that 
the hour for drinking the hemlock had come. The 
dying man raised himself upon his bed of pain and 
for two hours conversed feverishly with the faith- 
ful friends, the weeping pupils, who surrounded 
him. His last words testified to the serenity of 
a strong soul who controls the final agonies in his 
thoughts for those he is about to leave, and who 
affirms for the last time the faith and sentiments 
which have always inspired him. Of one of his 
favorite pupils who was absent he said: "Dear 
Carey, always good, always upright, always firm, 
tell him how I love him! Those good young men 
who always do their duty, how I love them ! Tell 
them how I love them!" Then addressing another 
pupil whom he held in especial esteem: " Preach 
the laws of God; preach them till their light pene- 
trates the darkness of the world." At last the 
agony began, during which Mann pronounced 
only broken words: "Man — God — Duty." 
Then death arrived, not calm and peaceful but 
tormented, agitated, as the life had been. "It 
was hard for that powerful brain to die!" At 



122 HORACE MANN 

least until his last hour Mann had preserved 
his lucidity of mind and proclaimed his faith, 
remaining to the end an apostle, a prophet, — 
the prophet of the happiness of men through 
virtue. 



Horace Mann's Influence and the Spread 
of his Work 

If it were granted to Horace Mann to live again 
and revisit this world, he would doubtless find 
some subjects for disappointment and bitterness. 
Were he to make once more, fifty years later, his 
European trip, he would discover with grief the 
distressing increase, in some countries at least, of 
the curse of alcoholism. He would read with pain, 
in the newspapers of his own country, that 
"the horrors of intemperance are the greatest 
evil of American life." And, above all, he, the 
friend of peace among men, the "pacificator," as 
we say to-day, with what sorrowful eyes would 
he behold the military spirit and its formidable 
armaments increasing even in the United States. 

On the other hand, what joy the abolition of 
slavery would cause him. He died three years 
before the outbreak of the civil war of 1861-1865. 
He would have been saddened by the bloody vio- 
lence of that fratricidal strife, but would have 

123 



124 HORACE MANN 

rejoiced over its results, since it put an end to 
the institution of slavery, which he held in such 
abhorrence. But, above all, if he could contem- 
plate to-day the magnificent growth of popular 
education in all countries, particularly his own, 
the apostle of education would certainly feel happi- 
ness and pride in the spread and progress of his 
ideas, while admitting, doubtless, that the efforts 
of his successors have been powerless up to this 
time in abolishing the evil in the world, and that 
humanity, in spite of having grown more learned 
and enlightened, is still a long way from attaining 
that ideal of happiness and virtue of which he 
had dreamed. 

For half a century the United States have faith- 
fully conformed in the matter of public education 
to the programme which Mann had traced for them. 
He had wished to see the schoolhouses habitable, 
comfortable, even architecturally fine, and America 
has clothed herself with scholastic palaces, which 
none of her children dream of criticising. He 
desired free schools, with the schooling obligatory ; 
and one no longer sees in America those paying 
public schools, which he called the "blot on our 
civilization.' ' The poor school has disappeared, and, 
moreover, vigorous efforts have been made that 
obligatory education should not be a mere name, 



HORACE MANN 125 

certain States going so far as to refuse the rights of 
suffrage to the illiterate. He desired the common 
school to be universal, frequented by the children 
of the rich as well as of the destitute, in order that 
aristocratic prejudices should fade away, which 
separate in institutions of learning the children 
of one country, and which too long forbade the 
sons of well-to-do citizens from sitting on the 
same school benches with the sons of farmers and 
workingmen. For any citizen not to send his 
children to the public schools on the pretext that 
he is rich and that these schools are open gratui- 
tously to all, appeared to Mann to be treason against 
democracy. In this direction, also, progress is 
apparent, though still incomplete. He was averse 
to introducing any positive religious instruction 
into the school, regarding the teaching of dogmas as 
despotism on the master's part and servitude on that 
of the scholars. He almost grasped the necessity 
of an absolutely and purely lay school; for while 
he admitted the reading of the Bible, he forbade 
accompanying it with any commentary. At the 
present day, although America, amid its diversity 
of sects, has remained more faithful to its ancient 
religious faith than certain European countries, 
there are, nevertheless, numbers of American edu- 
cators who would go farther than Mann, and who 



126 HORACE MANN 

are disposed to exclude from the schools even the 
reading of the Bible. "If there are children who do 
not wish to read the Bible/ ' they say, "the Bible 
should not be inscribed on the school programme." 

Mann was the first secretary of a regularly estab- 
lished board of education in the United States, and 
to-day there does not exist within the great Ameri- 
can Union a single State which does not possess, 
under one form or another, a central authority 
established for the supervision and direction of 
the public schools. Sometimes it is a board of 
education similar to the Boston one; sometimes 
it consists merely of a single head, a superintendent ; 
in the Western States a county superintendent, 
in the East a city superintendent and, moreover, 
with widely different powers. One such super- 
intendent corresponds to our provincial minister 
of public* instruction, another is merely the director 
of a bureau of information and statistics. But 
everywhere, taught by Mann's example, the Ameri- 
cans have established an official authority who 
presides over the destiny of schools, and it would 
appear that at this very moment a movement 
is started to extend its action and reenforce its 
powers. 

Progress in school organization, progress in 
administration — all this, however, has not been 



HORACE MANN 127 

accomplished in a day. The United States have 
not, like France, a centralized government, where 
an order from above, a national law, can, from one 
day to the next, transform the entire system of 
education and impose uniform and universal rules 
over its whole territory. Each State in the Union 
has its individual spirit and character, and by the 
very reason of their diversity of manners and 
social condition, they have not all advanced at 
an equal pace along the path of progress. Just 
as on a summer night the stars shine forth in the 
sky one after another, according to their magnitude 
and position in space, so the States of the American 
Union have set in motion their scholastic enter- 
prises successively and gradually, according to 
their resources and their degree of advancement 
in the march of civilization. It is the Eastern 
States that have led the way, but the Western 
States have followed with such rapid strides that 
they no longer have anything for which to envy 
their precursors. 1 

To the appeal of Mann, of Barnard, and all their 
followers, the United States have made a superb 
response. At the dawn of the twentieth century, 
they offer to the admiration of the world an en- 

1 Ohio had appointed a superintendent in 1837, three months 
before the establishment of the Boston Board. 



128 HORACE MANN 

semble of scholastic institutions which no other 
country can surpass. 1 They assemble in their 
public schools of the first grade more than 
15,000,000 children, as many as the total population 
of Spain. The teachers in these institutions, men 
and women, number 426,000, and the annual 
expenditure is $212,000,000, i.e. over a billion 
francs, as much as France expends in maintaining 
her army and navy. 

Mann, whatever may have been the ardor of 
his hopes, would have stood amazed before this 
marvellous effort. To speak of Massachusetts alone, 
the State to which he communicated the most 
vigorous impulse, what a change and what progress 
in fifty years ! In 1848 the budget of that State for 
common school education did not exceed $700,000 ; 
it now reaches more than $11,000,000. In 
1848 Massachusetts possessed but three normal 
schools, those with which Mann had endowed 
the State; they number ten to-day. The school 
population has risen from 185,000 children in 
1848 to 424,000 in 1896. And, finally, the number of 
men and women teachers has increased from 7924 to 
12,275 (of whom 11,197 are women to 1078 men). 

1 Among the causes to which the United States owe the admirable 
progress in primary education, we must note the abolition of slavery, 
which opened the way for public schools in sixteen new States. 



HORACE MANN 129 

Two ideas equally dear to Mann's heart, co- 
education and instruction by women, have become 
more and more acclimated in the United States. 
In Massachusetts, as we have shown in the figures 
quoted above, the proportion is eleven women 
teachers to one man, and it is nearly the same all 
over America. 1 As to coeducation, it does not 
cease to make progress, and is in general favor, 
not only in the public schools, but even in colleges 
and universities. It has become — and how 
Mann would rejoice thereat ! — a characteristic 
feature of the American school system. Mann 
was concerned not only with the elementary public 
schools, he was equally interested in schools of 
the second degree, such as are called in America 
high schools. The first high school was founded 
in Boston in 1821 ; Mann occupied himself with 
starting others, and to-day, on the showing of Mr. 
Harris, the eminent director of the Washington 
Board of Education, the increase in the number 
of high schools is perhaps the most important 
event in the history of education in the United 
States during the last years of the nineteenth century. 
This progress was for a long time slow and im- 
perceptible. In 1860 the whole United States 

1 In certain cities the proportion in favor of women is even higher. 
In Philadelphia, in 1899, 3174 women were teaching to 190 men. 



130 HORACE MANN 

counted but 40 schools of this type, to more than 
800 in 1880. But in the last twenty years of the 
nineteenth century, American intermediate educa- 
tion received an immense impetus; in fact, the 
number of high schools in 1900 was about 6000, 
with more than 500,000 pupils, boys and girls — 
244 of these schools being in Massachusetts alone. 1 
If Mann's influence, after the lapse of fifty years, 
still pervades the scholastic institutions of the 
United States, it was especially during his life- 
time that it was powerful and effective. Nor 
was it in the State of Massachusetts alone that he 
exercised this influence. Before he had carried 
his scholastic gospel in person to the Mississippi 
Valley, his writings, and especially his school re- 
ports, had circulated far and wide. " Mann's 
reports," wrote George B. Emerson, in 1844, "have 
waked an echo in the woods of Maine, on the banks 
of the St. Lawrence, on the shores of the Great 
Lakes. They have been read and listened to in 
New York, in the West and Southwest. The im- 
portance they have acquired is shown by the fact 

1 It is to be noticed, moreover, that the number of girls in 
the high schools considerably surpasses that of boys, — 200,000 
boys only to 300,000 girls, — which is to be regretted, since, ac- 
cording to the testimony of its warmest defenders, coeducation 
has full efficacy only in schools where the proportion between 
the sexes is about equal. 



HORACE MANN 131 

that a man from Massachusetts has been selected 
to organize the schools of New Orleans. At this 
very moment his reports are regenerating the 
Rhode Island schools, while in the remotest corners 
of Ohio forty people have been known to meet 
to read together the only copy of the Boston secre- 
tary's reports which they had been able to obtain." 
The worth of a great man is recognized in this, 
— that he founds a school and raises up imitators 
and disciples. Mann inspired one such disciple, 
who became almost his equal, and shares with 
him the honor of having led the pedagogic move- 
ment in the United States in the nineteenth century. 
This was Henry Barnard, of whom Mann said 
in 1850, "If one wishes to find a more capable 
man than he, one must wait for the next genera- 
tion." Barnard was in turn school superintendent 
of Connecticut from 1832 to 1842, State superin- 
tendent for Rhode Island from 1843 to 1849, presi- 
dent of St. John's College from 1858 to 1867, and, 
finally, commissioner of the Board of Education in 
Washington from 1867 to 1870. His career offers many 
analogies with that of Mann : if the latter was promi- 
nent in the reform of asylums for the insane, Bar- 
nard labored equally for prison reform and for the 
reorganization of institutions for the blind and deaf 
and dumb. The great American educators have 



132 HORACE MANN 

always extended their solicitude to the infirm, the 
abnormal, — to those disinherited by nature. 

Barnard published for forty years the American 
Journal of Education, a real encyclopaedia of pedagogy 
from the historical, as well as the doctrinal, point 
of view. He had but one claim to superiority 
over Mann, — that of a longer life, since born in 
1811, he died, full of years, in 1901. 

Mann's countrymen have not forgotten what they 
owe him. They have raised statues to him, and in 
1897 they celebrated the anniversary of his birth ; but 
what is better still is that they remain faithful to his 
inspiration, and he may be said to be still present in 
their midst. It may be said also that his spirit has 
penetrated into Europe and particularly into France. 
It will not be detracting from the honor due to the 
organizers of elementary instruction in France under 
the Third Republic to say that they were in great 
measure inspired by the thought and example 
of the great American educator. To mention but 
one, our Pecaut, above all, appears to us as a French 
Horace Mann, more impressive, of a deeper and 
more intense inner life, more reserved and discreet ; a 
Horace Mann without the gift of oratory, but with 
greater moderation and delicacy of mental quality, 
worthy in any case to figure, like him, in the front 
rank in the golden book of great modern educators. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 

There can be no question here of giving a complete bibli- 
ography of Mann's works, nor especially of the five or six hun- 
dred books and pamphlets published about him. Let us 
cite merely the principal editions of his writings and the most 
important of the studies which have appeared regarding his 
work. 

Horace Mann, Reports as Secretary of the Board of Educa- 
tion of Massachusetts, 12 vols. Boston, 1838-1849. 

The same, abridged and edited by George Combe Mann, 
4 vols. Boston, 1891. 

Horace Mann, Lectures on Education, 1 vol. Boston, 
1845. 

Mary Mann, Life of Horace Mann, by his Wife, 1st edition. 
Boston, 1865. 

Mary Mann, Life and Works of Horace Mann, 5 vols. Cam- 
bridge, 1867. 

In the Reports of the Commissioner of Education, published 
in Washington, will be found a series of studies upon Horace 
Mann. We will point out two particularly important ones. 

Horace Mann, by Mr. W. T. Harris; notice followed by 
a bibliography made out by one of Mann's sons, Mr. B. 
Pickman Mann, and which, although incomplete, comprises 
no less than 600 different publications (Reports, etc., 1895- 
1896, pp. 886-927). 

Horace Mann and the Great Revival of the American Common 
School, by A. D. Mayo. (Reports, etc., 1896-1897, pp. 715-767). 

Barnard, Horace Mann. Hartford, 1858. 

133 



134 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Hinsdale, Horace Maim and Public Education in the United 
States, hi the collection The Great Educators. New York, 1898. 

French works : — 

Laboulaye, Lecture on the Importance of Education in 
a Republic. Paris, 1873. 

Gaufres, Horace Mann, his Work, his Writings, 1 vol. Paris, 
Hachette, 2d edition, 1897. 

Felix Pecaut, article in the Revue pedagogiquc, 1888, vol. 1. 



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